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.

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.

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?