Tag Archives: Castle

Day 9 – Tomar

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Saturday 5 September – It was rather nice not having to leap out of bed at 7am in order to pack our bags ready for them to be transferred to the next accommodation, because today was a rest day – we can not-hike without feeling a scrap of guilt. That said, the alarm still went off at 7am because we wanted to get out and about in Tomar before the (forecast 38°C) heat of the day became too oppressive for walking around in.

Tomar is, as I’ve said, Knights Templar GHQ, and the centre of the GHQ is the castle at the top of the hill, which we could see from our hotel room.

Firstly, then, a little more historical background to explain why what we saw during the day is a matter of such pith and moment.

The castle, built (you remember, of course) from 1160 by Gualdim Pais, was built primarily as part of the country’s defence against the band of marauding riffs Moorish empire (it withstood a Moorish siege in 1190, for example). It’s one of Portugal’s most significant historical and architectural sites. Inside the castle walls, over the centuries, a huge convent was developed, based around an original construction known as the “Charola”.

The Charola is a round Templar church at the heart of the complex, built by Gualdim Pais in the years following the foundation of the fortress. It took the form of a two-tier Romanesque rotunda modelled on Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre: an inner octagonal drum resting on eight pillars, wrapped in a sixteen-sided ambulatory. Tradition holds that Templar knights could hear Mass from horseback within it.

After the Templars were suppressed in 1312 and the Order of Christ was founded in 1319 as their successor, the Charola remained the spiritual centre of the complex, but it began to grow. Prince Henry the Navigator, serving as Grand Master in the fifteenth century, added a nave onto the round church, considerably extending its size and setting the stage for a fuller conventual church.

The major rebuilding and decoration came under King Manuel I in the early sixteenth century. He had Henry’s nave reconstructed in, unsurprisingly, the elaborate Manueline style named after him. João de Castilho contributed the ornate portal linking the old Charola to the new Manueline church, while the famous Chapter House Window (of which more later) dates from the same period. The Charola’s own remarkable interior decoration — murals, polychrome wood statues, and gilding — was largely executed across the sixteenth century as well. Hugely extending the scope of the edifice, the convent’s eight cloisters were added in further stages after this, starting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

So: this was to be the main object of our peregrinations today. As you can see from the photo, it’s another thing that is (sigh) at the top of a hill. We passed the city’s Pillory

and walked up

and up

until we saw the line of coaches that told us we must be at the entrance. Three more flights of stairs took us into the Convent of Christ’s innards, past a moquette of the edifice

in which you can see the central nature of the “drum” surrounding the Charola, past a courtyard or two

in which we could see some Manueline window elaboration and some beautiful tiling.

Then we rounded a corner into the Charola itself and

Oh. My. God.

If you have six minutes or so to spare, I hope that this video gives some kind of impression of how gobsmackingly extraordinary the Charola is.

and here are some photos as well. It’s impossible to do justice to how impressive it is.

The ceiling

Artwork on the walls

Figures inside the Octagon

Figures inside the Octagon

It’s a work in progress; there is considerable restoration work going on, a project which (if the guide we earwigged is right) will take 50 years. This is partly through neglect and partly through idiocy; apparently one king had that fabulous ceiling painted over in white and they’re only slowly and carefully restoring it. There are frescoes

whose surrounds need significant restoration work. Some of the artworks on the walls have been lost; the remaning ones have been concentrated in one area to give an impression of what the whole thing must once have been like. One can only walk around it and gawp at the opulence of what has survived and been restored.

We were glad that we’d got there reasonably early, as it meant there were very few people there. As we left, a tour group arrived,

which would have put the kybosh on any chance of decent photography had we had to follw them. Instead we fled before them, trying to keep ahead as we looked into the nave and the inside of the famous Manueline Window

and carried on into the various cloisters.

These are photos from the Great Cloister, which has been beautifully cleaned up; others showed that there was a long way to go to knock the place into some kind of shape.

Then, of course, there was The Window – the Chapter House Window that is such a famous example of the over-the-top elaborate Manueline style. I had only heard vague references to it and seen representations in azulejos, so I wasn’t too surprised to see it like this.

I later learned that its pristine appearance is relatively recent. Courtesy of Travel in Portugal, I found out that until July 2022 it looked like this.

Image Countresy of Travel-in-Portugal.com

The entire façade that features the window has been cleaned up and looks wonderful.

(Sorry, this picture isn’t very good; in order to get the whole façade in, the perspective is rather distorted.)

The convent is a labyrinth and we blundered about a bit looking at various parts of it, eventually passing the very impressive refectory

with its pulpits on either side from which bible texts could be read whilst the monks ate,

the kitchens,

and the toilets.

We could have spent hours there, but after seeing the Charola, my brain was overwhelmed and not ready for delving into historical details about indiviual cloisters and other items. So we left by the entrance we’d arrived at, where there was a chap dressed up as a Knight Templar

who must have been boiling in his suit, and was rather disappointed that we didn’t want our photos taken with him, as that was how he got paid.

The convent is part of the castle complex, but one can’t get in to the castle at the moment as there is significant restoration work going on there as well. We took a look at what of the walls we could see

and peered at the view back over those bloody stairs of yesterday

(see the little pointy white thing top left? see the road down there bottom right?) before heading back into the city.

There were a couple of things that Jane wanted to make sure we took a look at. We started at the St. John the Baptist church so that we could grab a selo for our credenciales, and I took the opportunity for a shot of Gualdim Pais because the light was good.

Then we headed out to look at a couple of other churches. The first one was closed and the second one, the Igreja Santa Maria do Olival,

had a wedding about to start, so a grab shot of the interior was all that could be done today.

Its significance is that it is where the original Grand Master Knights are buried; maybe we’ll get a chance to explore before we leave Tomar. Getting to this church did afford us a splendid view of the castle walls

and we noted a few other things as we walked back to the hotel in heat that was beginning to be really very intense indeed – our early start had been a good idea.

There were a couple of attractive corners of the city worth photographing

but also we noticed that the pavements have been Templarised,

which must take a lot of work to create all those half tiles. We also saw this

a thing we’d first noted as we came into the city. Its significance only became clear when we took lunch at the hotel again. The restaurant has a mural around one wall

clearly summing up the city – and on it one can see the pre-restored Chapter House Window. In another corner of the mural, Jane spotted this

and the significance of the thing on that roundabout became clearer. The picture is of the Festa dos Tabuleiros (Trays), which originates from ancient pagan harvest rituals dedicated to the goddess Ceres, which later merged into the Cult of the Holy Spirit during the 14th century under Queen Saint Isabel and King Dinis. According to local legend, this is deeply tied to the “Miracle of the Roses,” where the charitable queen, confronted by her husband for sneaking bread to the poor, opened her cloak to reveal a shower of roses instead. The festival occurs every four years, and is next officially scheduled to take place from July 3 to July 12, 2027.
Everything culminates in the grand Sunday procession, where young women dressed in white symbolizing purity carry tall headdresses on their heads made of 30 stacked loaves of bread, decorated with colorful paper flowers, ears of corn, and topped with a crown and a white dove representing the Holy Spirit. They process through streets intricately decorated with hand-crafted paper flowers, assisted by their male partners walking alongside them to prevent any loss of balance along the crowded route. Apparently the 2023 event attracted 600,000 visitors.

The heat had once again become too punishing to make another sortie at all rewarding, so we relaxed for the rest of the day. The next Caminho section, to Cortiça, is 26km – seven or eight hours’ walking. With the combination of temperatures once again forecast to be high (34°C) and it being Sunday, meaning cafés en route will be largely closed, the discretion/valour A/B testing is coming down heavily in favour of A, so Uber may well get some more of our money. Stay tuned to find out, eh?

More looking around Lisbon

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Monday 24 August 2026 – The weather forecast for the morning was not one that encouraged tourism in any way at all, so we treated ourselves to a lie-in and a late breakfast. The Plan A for the day was to take the 15E tram to Belém, admire the monastery, tower and statue dedicated to Henry the Navigator before retiring to Belém’s famous Pie Shop to have one of their pastel de natas, which are world famous in Belem. We’re very fortunate that Jane checked out this plan in some detail in the morning, at which point we discovered that Belém is shut on a Monday. This gave us a fair chunk of the day back, and we decided that a visit to the castle was likely to be a decent thing to do. We relaxed for the rest of the morning whilst comparing the Met Office and Accuweather versions of the forecast to see when we could venture out.

In the end, the Met Office was more sanguine about the rain clearing so we decided to believe its version of the truth and headed out towards the castle via a coffee stop, which was educational in its way, both for us and the café staff. Our serving of choice for coffee is a flat white, which we thought translated into Portuguese as a meia de leite. The waitress insisted that a galão was what we were after, so we trusted her. Not that it’s a huge issue, but future coffee-drinking travellers might like to to note that a galão is effectively a latte, so if you want a flat white, don’t ask for one of them. We pointed out the similarity between galão and caffe latte to the waitress and hope that future visitors to that coffee shop will benefit from our experience.

We also passed some nice tile work,

particularly fine examples being at the viewpoint the Miradouro de Santa Luzia

which rather flattered to deceive, since the view it gave one was mainly of cruise ships in the harbour. I read that it’s at the head of an elevador, and indeed followed a sign pointing me at it. But I couldn’t find it and further research (thank you to my editor) informs us that it’s well disguised and looks like part of an apartment block, so it’s one of those things that IYKYK; Google Maps won’t help you find it.

The online map that Walk The Camino had sent us as part of our preparation was of the opinion that the Caminho actually started at Santa Luzia, rather than at the Cathedral, which would on the face of it seem to be a more intuitive place to start on your 610km journey. We cast around for a bit to see if we could find any evidence of this; Jane had noted that there was a Rua de Santiago, so that seemed a promising avenue, sorry, Rua of investigation,

and Jane eventually spotted this, on a building nearby, which turned out to be – wait for it – the church of Santiago de Lisboa!

So our online map was accurate, but I’m buggered if I saw any other signposts for a Caminho in the area, or, indeed anywhere else we’d been in the city.

We’d made a fair uphill journey (sans elevador,if you’ll pardon me mixing my languages) to get to Santa Luzia. The castle was further uphill. Everything in Lisbon is further uphill. This is a typical profile of a wander round Lisbon.

We made our way to the castle, for which Jane had bought tickets in advance – which is just as well, as the ticket office and entry were small-to-medium sized bundles of chaos in an otherwise relatively ordered world. We’d hoped to get on a 1pm English language guided tour, but long story short there wasn’t one, so we just wandered round to see what we could see.  And what we could see mainly was some very fine views across the city.

Across the water is the Santuário de Cristo Rei, with its (slightly) junior version of the Rio de Janeiro Christ statue,

and we got a lovely panorama of the city

as well as a view of things we’d seen in passing yesterday with Carlos: the ruins of the Carmo Convent;

the “under maintenance” Elevador Santa Justa;

and the Graça church (if you look carefully, you can see the funicular carriage in transit).

We could also make out about half of the Star of David fountain in Praça Martim Moniz, the gateway to the Jewish quarter.

Lisbon was under Moorish rule for almost 450 years from 711. The fortress was built in the 10th century and was captured by King Afonso Henriques during the Siege of Lisbon in 1147, part of the great Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors. Because we didn’t manage to get on to a guided tour, we didn’t learn much more about the castle, but it was pleasant to wander around. Entry to the main part is over a moat

which Carlos had told us (with, I think, a certain ghoulish relish) was filled with human excrement as a way of discouraging invaders. This was in its day, you understand. Modern health and safety would have something to say about it these days.

The walls and parapets are extremely well-preserved and accessible.

There are several items of interest, such as this sundial

and arrow slits constructed so that bows could be shot in multiple directions.

All in all it was an enjoyable hour or so we spent wandering around. There are peacocks in the grounds and we saw two peahens, each with their chicks of differing ages, which were rather cute.

We had a very engaging encounter just outside the exit of the castle. A sign invited us to look inside the Castle’s church, the Church of Santa Cruz, labelled “Lisbon’s birthplace”*, and so, on a whim, we did.  It’s nothing particularly spectacular inside,

although the altar piece is lavishly decorated.

What marked it out was a chance conversation with a young lady who was busy doing detailed conservation work on some of the elaborate curlicues.

She explained to us what she was doing: applying a white base to smooth out the outlines of the feature; then she would apply some red colour (which you can see in places already set); and finally she would apply gold leaf

which would be burnished in once it was well and truly stuck down. She was delightful to talk to and very patient with our dumb questions.

The walk back to the hotel led past a few other sights of note: some street art;

a shop with a bizarre range of artefacts on display

including, delightfully, Christ on a bicycle,

an image which will stay with me whever I need to swear; some more lovely azulejas,

and the excavation site of a Roman theatre.

which once would have looked like this.

There was a wall with a lovely demonstration of anti-aliasing (Google that, if necessary)

a café which actually had flat white on the menu,

and the church of St.Anthony

with its vivid floral display,

which Jane managed to get a picture of between the hordes of people using it as the backdrop for fucking selfies.

For our dinner, we went to an area we’d first noted in our search for Earl Grey (we’d thought that an Auchan, even a little local one, might have some, but no….). It’s a cross road to the Rua Augusta, which has any number of touristy eateries along it, but one restaurant among all the others called to us

mainly because it was the only one not to have pictures of its food on display. It was called Em Alta Na Baixa,  and it was very good – a fitting note on which to (pretty much) end our stay in Lisbon.

We will meet Carlos tomorrow and he has, he tells us, plans for about an hour more of showing us around Lisbon before he takes us off to Sintra – where he will be our guide the day after. Sintra appears to have all manner of strange and wonderful Things To See, and we’ve never been there before, so we’re rather looking forward to it and hope that you now are, also, and will stay in touch with these pages to see how we got on.

 

 

*  The Igreja Paroquial do Castelo, also known as the Church of Santa Cruz, is an 18th century building within the castle walls, occupying the site of the old fortress mosque (which itself was on the site of a Roman temple). Since the mosque was purified and consecrated as a Christian church immediately upon the reconquest of Lisbon on 25 October 1147, and the church holds the city’s oldest administrative parish records, it merits the title “Lisbon’s birthplace”.

 

Day 10 – San Quirico d’Orcia to Castiglione d’Orcia – short but sharp

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Friday 23 May 2025 – Despite the short distance we had to walk today – 10km is the official distance – we still found ourselves up and ready to depart by 8am. I had looked at the profile of the walk offered by the S-cape app

and formed the opinion that it should be really quite easy, with only gentle ups and downs.

Wrongly, as it turned out. I should instead have looked at the representation offered by Garmin Connect for the same track,

which gives a far better impression of what the day will bring.

Anyhoo…

The breakfast arrangements for our B&B took the form of a voucher to be used at L’Officina del Gusto (The Office of Taste), which had interesting decor

but a limited selection of breakfasts: sweet or savoury. As we continued on our route, the weather looked a trifle ominous

and the various weather apps suggested that there was a real possibility of rain.  However, none materialised and the morning was cooler than we’d experienced before on this walk. We soon left the tarmac for a dirt road, with the usual offering of great scenery.

As we walked along, Jane and I agreed that the Via Francigena was better than the Camino Francés for scenery, but the Camino offered much better infrastructure, particularly rest stops. I guess if you want the scenery, you have to be prepared to walk up the hills.

We passed a few frog ponds,

which were all as noisy as the first one we’d seen a couple of days ago. It struck me that you don’t get that kind of racket in frog ponds in the UK, but I’m not an expert in country ways. Jane, however, has roots in the countryside and she agreed that frogs in the UK weren’t that noisy. Perhaps it’s because these are Italian frogs? We’ve noticed that Italians in groups and silence are to a large extent mutually exclusive.*

A large lump hove into view,

giving us the opportunity to disagree on exactly what it was. Jane thought it might be Radicofani, and I thought it might be Ripa d’Orcia. We were both well wrong, but we did find out eventually what it was. (That’s the bait to keep you reading, which is a bit pathetic, really, but this is the level to which I’ve sunk.)

We knew that there were a couple of interesting stops on the way, and we soon saw the first,

the roofs (rooves?) of Vignoni Alto, described as “one of the best-preserved fortified villages in Tuscany”. Our route led us through it, and it is indeed a very attractive place; we think it’s mainly holiday apartments to let.

Some of the apartments have a simply staggering view.

It was very quiet and therefore too good an opportunity for aerial photography to miss out on.

The road from there leads down

and down and down; it’s a dirt road, but one with signs for motorists warning them that it’s a dangerous slope. We were still fairly high on the road when we realised what the lump was.

It was Rocca di Tentennano (sometimes called Rocca di Castiglione); the reason we rumbled this was that it had been hiding Castiglione d’Orcia behind its bulk and we could now see that we were in for a bit of a climb to get to our destination for the day. However, before we could start the ascent, we had to complete the descent, which led past the other point of interest of the day – Bagno Vignoni, a thermal spa.

While it was always going to be interesting to see the baths, the main thing for me was the presence there of a coffee stop.

It was a popular stop and there were a many cyclists there as well as pellegrinos and a few posh-looking people in civvies – there’s an upmarket hotel attached to the spa. You can tell because the inevitable cypresses are manicured to within an inch of their lives.

It’s an attractive setting.

and we enjoyed looking around it almost as much as we enjoyed the coffee and (very good) filled croissants that were on offer.

The Via route after that continues down and has to cross a river at its lowest point. In theory, there’s a pedestrian bridge across it

but it’s closed; they really don’t want you to use it.

We therefore walked around the road and started the ascent. This is where I realised how much I had misread the profile diagram. Bits of it were really steep – 18.6° was the steepest I recorded, and that is 1 in 3. I hastily revised my decision not to use walking poles and we made our way up the slope (it wasn’t all up, but the bits that were up were quite hard going). Of course, the views improved as we ascended.

and we eventually reached Castiglione

which was very pretty

and very full of cyclists.

We found out that our visit had coincided with the Tuscany Trail; some 600 lunatics cyclists completing a 430km ride. I didn’t notice any e-bikes among them….

Castiglione d’Orcia, being a place with a long historical record (first noted in the year 714) has a street layout that doesn’t owe much to common sense, and a street numbering system to match.  Jane did a great job to actually find our B&B, Il Vecchietta, which, it being only about 1.30pm,

was, of course, closed. However, a phone call brought forth someone to let us in, and we were able to hose ourselves down before heading down to the restaurant, Il Cassero, whence the kind person with the keys had come to our aid. We had a Nice Lunch there; very Italian and very affably served. I continued the pasta experiment and will report on it in due course.

After lunch, we had some time before the local Coop opened and we could buy milk for any cups of tea we might plan, and so I took the opportunity to do some more aerial work.

Rocca del Tentennano, which is a fortress. Really, it is.

You can clearly see the castle that gives this place its name

The walk to and from the Coop gave us the chance for some more pictures of the place.

Like Horace Wimp’s girl, it’s small, but veeery pretty.

And so to tomorrow, where we are back to dealing with a long walk, towards Radicofani, which involves a fair bit of uphill work and several fords, so it’s likely to be interesting as well as testing. The arrangements are all very complicated, but All Will Be Revealed in the next post.

 

* Sorry to appear racist, but I couldn’t resist