Evora, Arraiolos & Montemor-o-Novo

Evora

We drove up to 130 km from Lisbon to get to Evora, capital of the Alentejo region. I expected a lot from this city (listed as one of UNESCO’s World Heritage) but didn’t get to see much, apart from the “exterior” monuments - the Loios Church, the Cathedral, Giraldo Square - center of the city....and most important, the Roman temple of Evora (improperly called Diana Temple), built in Corinthian style– a 1st century temple dedicated probably to the Cult of Emperor Augustus. The court of the first and second dynasties resided here for long periods, constructing palaces, monuments and religious buildings and Evora became the scene for many royal weddings and, as they say, a place where many important decisions were made. The city is a little bit expensive, the food seems to be nice (though I didn't get to taste much of it) and the region is extremely quiet and beautiful – we saw different breeds of cows, sheep, horses and even rabbits :-)













Arraiolos

Any Portuguese knows Arraiolos, famous for its hand-made carpets, with a special technique (and no, I don´t have any picture with the carpets but you can find them on Google, of course). What we found in Arraiolos was a town square where all the old men (and not women!!) of Arraiolos gathered together, I guess talking about everything and nothing, watching the passer-by and enjoying the Sun. I didn't buy and carpet :-) even though I like them a lot, but took a lot of interesting pictures with the above mentioned old men. What I also found out was that Óbidos is not the only place in Portugal where houses have a blue trim at the base of the construction, but Arraiolos have them too, they are supposed to ward off the devil-hmmm....should we all paint our houses like this? The problem was that some of them had this line painted in gray and also yellow...what does that mean???

What I found out was that.... the technique used to make Arraiolos carpets is a "form of embroidery with counted dots". The stitches of the Arraiolos carpets are embroidered trough the network of a jute mesh in order to cover the whole surface of a piece cut to the wanted dimensions. Historically the carpets from Arraiolos have gone through at least three periods of evolution-the earliest still in existence date from the XVII century (they have simple motif reproductions from oriental rugs and the shades of red are the dominant colours). The second period occurs later in the XVII century where the oriental designs are mixed with a variety of stylised animal designs such as pigeons, peacocks and mammals. The dominant colours are red, yellow, blue and green. Some of the designs show clearly influences of the Spanish Levant, France (“Lis Fleur”) and Germany (The Eagle). The third period occurs in the beginning of the second decade of the XVIII century, here the oriental designs disappear and are substituted by complex floral motifs and traditional dolls. The dominant colours become blue, yellow and green. In the end of the XVIII century begins a period of decline. Instead of remaining faithful to the complexity and diversity of the motifs of the previous periods, there was a simplification of the floral style, mostly placed in a light or dark blue field, or geometric figures copies of tile designs.








Montemor-o-Novo

...and the last place we got to visit was a very pleasant surprise for us-Montemor-o-Novo was a nice "accident" in our trip-we wanted to see something interesting, but not that far away. We chose Montemor-o-Novo, by chance, where we picked up a lot of oranges (hmmm this should be a top secret though, sorry :-)), we got to see the ruins of a deserted castle, walked through a serene "park" and invaded the private property of a local, attracted by the beautiful orange trees (no, we didn't cause any conflict, don't worry, as Portuguese are really nice and we are innocent :-)).