Capela dos Ossos

Overview

The Capela dos Ossos, the Chapel of Bones, is a small chapel beside the entrance to the church of São Francisco in Évora whose walls and eight pillars are built of human skulls and long bones, the remains of an estimated 5,000 people exhumed from the city’s medieval cemeteries by the Franciscans and set in cement in patterns. Over the door is the line that every visitor photographs: “We bones that are here await yours.”

It is three bays 18.7 m long and 11 m wide, lit by three small windows, with a painted brick ceiling of death motifs, two desiccated corpses in glass cases, one of them a child, and a verse from Ecclesiastes on the vault, “Better is the day of death than the day of birth”.

History

The Franciscans built the chapel in the 17th century as a memento mori, at a time when the dozens of churchyards inside the walls were full and the friars were moving the bones anyway; rather than bury them again they used them as the fabric of a place to meditate on mortality, the same impulse that produced the Capuchin crypts of Rome and Palermo. The poem in the wooden frame on one of the pillars, on the need to reflect on one’s own existence, is attributed to Father António da Ascenção Teles, parish priest of São Pedro from 1845 to 1848.

Visiting

The chapel opens from the forecourt of São Francisco, with a ticket that also covers the church’s museum of sacred art and the terrace above; it opens at 09:00 daily and closes in the late afternoon, later in winter than in summer. Inside, the skulls line the pillars in rows and the long bones fill the walls between them, with the odd graffito scratched into a forehead by earlier visitors; the light is dim and the space small, so early morning before the groups is the time.

The church itself, Gothic with a Manueline porch and a single wide nave, is worth the detour; the Praça 1º de Maio outside has the market hall and the public garden.

Tips

• Ten minutes is enough for the chapel; the ticket’s museum upstairs and the roof terrace take longer and are empty.
• Photography is allowed; flash is not, and the guards enforce it.
• The Saturday farmers’ market on the square outside runs 06:00 to 13:00.
• Évora’s other famous bones are in the cathedral museum: the reliquary of the True Cross with its 1,426 gems.

Nearby

• Praça do Giraldo: three minutes.
• Jardim Público: two minutes.
• Cathedral of Évora: eight minutes uphill.
• Roman Temple: ten minutes.