In palaces and convents, churches, castles, towers, crumbling Roman ruins, fine country houses, Portugal is as rich as any land. The chief attraction of the Palacio das Necessidades at Lisbon is its splendid grounds, now open to the public. From the Tagus the most imposing building is the great mass of the Church of S. Vicente, which the morbid visit to see the Princes and Kings of Portugal in their glass-covered coffins. Of Lisbon’s ancient buildings that which most forcibly appeals to eye and imagination is the ruined Carmo, now serving as an archaeological museum, standing so nobly over the city and carrying the mind back to the days of Nun’ Alvares Pereira, one of the greatest figures of all time. But the finest building of Lisbon—since a street now connects with the capital what was formerly a separate village, is the Church and Convent of Belem. The village still, however, maintains a certain individuality, with its wide common surrounded by low pink-washed houses and primitive arcades, and its statue of Affonso d’Albuquerque perched, like St. Simeon Stylites, on a high pillar, and looking out across the Tagus to the Atlantic, its peculiar square Tower of Belem jutting out into the river and, above all, the church of the Convent, which in its perfect proportions and ancient grey colouring is one of the most beautiful of the world’s buildings. To realise its beauty, the church must not be seen too near, since the famous doorway will seem to many excessively ornamented in its wealth of detail. But from the river seen in spring above the flowering Judas trees, or above the yellowing leaves in autumn, it might be some old Oxford college. And the interior is worthy of such beauty, in spite of the Manoeline style, which does its best to spoil the noble Gothic, in relation to which it stands as ivy to the trunk of a tree. The pillars go straight up without a break to a height of nearly a hundred feet, and about the whole place is a sense of spaciousness and fine proportion which the Manoeline decoration cannot mar. In little chapels round the church are the tombs of King Manoel I (who built the Convent to celebrate the voyage of Vasco da Gama, the buildings thus corresponding in stone to the Lusiads of Camões: ceci n’a pas tué cela); of his son King João III, variously judged by historians as a saint or a simpleton (it is not for nothing that the Spanish word for “blessed,” bendito, means also a fool: cf. the English “silly,” derived from the German selig); of Camões and of Vasco da Gama (the tomb is his, but there was a mistake in the bones when they were transferred thither from Vidigueira in 1880).

From Lisbon to Cintra is but a step, and it is equally pleasant to walk or drive or ride, but the train will take you there in little over half-an-hour. What strikes everyone on arriving at the village is the curious prominence of the two uncouth gigantic chimneys of the palace. This palace is now an archaeological museum, but the interest still centres in the legends and history and natural beauty of its walls, for the most part lined with fine old azulejos. The magpies of the ceiling in the Sala das Pegas have not been whitewashed away, the Sala dos Cisnes still keeps its swans, and the coats of arms cover the walls of the Sala dos Cervos, a stag in each case supporting the arms of the old families of Portugal—

Cf. Marvell’s

A path or no path leads to the grey ruined walls of the Castello dos Mouros above the village. Here legend would have it that the hapless poet, Bernardim Ribeiro, came to sigh for his royal mistress, King Manoel I’s daughter, who, however, probably left Lisbon and Cintra for Savoy some weeks before Ribeiro came to Lisbon from Alemtejo.

Far above on its peak, conspicuous far out to sea on both sides of the Serra, but in shape so different, as seen from Mafra or Collares and from the Estoril side, that one scarcely realises that it is the same building, stands the Castello da Pena, over 1,700 feet above sea-level. Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, husband of Queen Maria II of Portugal, bought the place towards the middle of the nineteenth century for a few hundred pounds. It was then merely a ruin of the convent built there by King Manoel I. The surrounding woods and gardens and the magnificent views from every window make this palace one of the most wonderful houses in Europe, wonderful, too, in the wealth of designs on pillar and archway (in imitation of the style Manoeline), and in many incidental beauties, especially the altar of alabaster and grey marble in the chapel. Below, set in luxuriant growth of azaleas and camellias, are the flower-gardens and the Fonte dos Passarinhos or das Andorinhas, with its white marble swallows drinking. In the palace private photographs and weapons belonging to the Portuguese Royal Family still hang from the walls, and the tables are covered with magazines and newspapers, dated October, 1910, precisely as on that autumn day on which Queen Amélie heard here the faint booming of the guns from Lisbon in revolution. Those who are not content with the exquisite partial view from the terrace of the dining-room climb by a little outer staircase to the wind-swept cupola. Winter and summer every wind that blows seems to redouble its force just here. For the sake of the view a north-east wind is to be preferred, but the view is always magnificent and extensive, in spite of the fact that it is bounded on two sides by the Atlantic. White sands mark the entrance of the Tagus with the Serra d’Ossa and Alemtejo beyond, and the long headland which begins in beautiful sand-dunes—beautiful in certain lights and days—and runs out to Cape Espichel. On afternoons of a clear land wind the cape is lit up by the sun in every crevice of its sheer white cliffs and stands out like an island in mid-ocean—with a strong resemblance to the southern cliffs of England. Immediately beneath the palace walls are the famous woods of the grounds down the sides of the Serra. The Serra itself extends on one side to the small villages of Charneca (Moor) and Areias (Sands), and on the other to Collares and the Praia das Maçãs (Shore of Apples). All this country is really a promontory some twenty miles across, between the Atlantic and the vast estuary of the Tagus. To the east the view includes such fragments of Lisbon as are not concealed by hills, while on the north a great black patch in the level plain is the Convent of Mafra.

The Convent of Mafra is eighteenth century, and would be uninteresting were it not for its sheer hugeness, which seems to defy you to criticise. It bullies you into accepting its ugliness, and stuns you with figures. Thus, you have scarcely recovered from the gigantic proportions of its towers and the steps hundreds of feet long in front of them when you are told that it was nearly thirty years a-building, and employed at times nearly 50,000 builders, that the tale of its doors is 5,200, of its windows 2,500. If you are incredulous, count them. The whole building measures some 275 by 240 yards, nearly a sixth of a mile long. The church is a glory of pink and white marble, magnificent but not beautiful. Yet it is worth going through Mafra to see the front of Mafra’s Convent, even if one does not stop to enter the building. The railway station is ten kilomètres from the village, so that most people drive there, but if anyone likes to take train to Mafra’s station, walk thence to Mafra, and then straight across to Cintra, he will be rewarded by a splendid view of the Serra to shorten his way. Seen from here, it is a gigantic wing folded over the village of Cintra, grey crags and dark wooded ravines, with the Cruz Alta, the Castle of Pena, and the Castle of the Moors to mark the heights. Mafra is about thirty-five kilomètres north-west of Lisbon, and another hundred kilomètres intervene between Mafra and Vallado—no unpleasant three days’ walk. Vallado is at about equal distance from Nazareth and the sea on one side and Alcobaça on the other.

To whatever pains the traveller may be put before reaching Alcobaça he will think nothing thereof when he sees the interior of this old Cistercian abbey, and to many the very remoteness of Alcobaça and Batalha, lying fortunately miles from any railway station, is no mean attraction. This Convent, like that of Mafra, is now used partly as barracks and partly as prison—the mixed company of prisoners may be seen white and hungry, stretching out their hands through the bars to the village street. But, whereas Mafra as a barracks seems to be usefully fulfilling its proper purpose, to quarter a regiment in Alcobaça’s monastery savours of desecration. However, the principal cloisters, the Cloisters of Dom Diniz, are still and peaceful, surrounding with their beautiful arches plots gay with flowers, as when the monks sought or sheltered from the sun here and were buried beneath the flagstones. Here is an old well with its ferns and crumbling Gothic architecture, and the whole place may give many an intense desire to have the good monks back there to enjoy it instead of half-a-dozen flurried and unappreciative tourists. The climate of Portugal makes it an ideal country for all whose sole vocation is endless contemplation, and where better fulfil that vocation than in these lovely convents! In winter the building provides a hundred corners of hot sun, and in hot weather the cold stone and the sound of running water recall some Seville patio. The guide-books for every two or three pages given to Batalha, will devote but one to Alcobaça. Yet for those who care for pure Gothic the latter is perhaps even the more attractive of the two. The narrow aisles, plain majestic pillars, and nobly sculptured capitals, make of its early Gothic church a severe and lovely building, and historically, of course, the interest of the place is very great. In the Sala dos Reis are statues of the early kings of Portugal, and azulejo scenes of the events which led to the foundation of the convent. As is well known, it was Affonso Henriques (that is, son of Count Henry of Burgundy), who began it, owing to an oath he had made to build a convent in the event of taking Santarem from the Moors. The capture of Santarem (1147 A.D.) was but one of the many successes of that great warrior king, the first king and the real founder of Portugal as a separate nation. Compared with so early a date, the giant caldron taken from the Spaniards after the battle of Aljubarrota (1385) is almost modern. It also stands in the Sala dos Reis, and it is well that one memorial of the deeds of the great Constable should be here, for the hero of Aljubarrota, Nun’ Alvares, and Affonso I had much in common. Both won many victories, and founded churches and convents, and both were inspired by a passionate love of the independence of their country. If Nun’ Alvares was the more chivalrous of the two this must be attributed to the intervening centuries. But it is not of Affonso Henriques that most visitors think when they are at Alcobaça, but of a time one generation earlier than that of Nun’ Alvares, who was but seven when King Pedro I (1357-67) died.

In one of the chapels of Alcobaça’s church are the tombs of King Pedro and of Inés de Castro. Legend would have it that they were buried feet to feet, in order that when the trumpet of the Day of Judgment sounded their eyes might meet at once as they rose from the dead. In the striking lines of the modern Portuguese poet, Snr. Affonso Lopes Vieira—striking by reason of their fine sound and volume—

Such subtleties were scarcely of that age, but the tombs (and their recumbent figures) certainly face one another, minutely and delightfully carved in stone. The rivers Alcoa and Baça meet at Alcobaça, and a tributary of the Alcoa, a tiny stream, runs beneath the convent. Some of the tombs in this Capella dos Tumulos are green with damp and run a fair chance of permanent injury. King Diniz’ mother as well as the children of Pedro and Inés are buried in the same chapel. Round the cruel fate of lovely Inés a whole literature has grown up in prose and verse, from the fine verses of the courtier poet Garcia de Resende—far the best that he wrote—in the reign of King Manoel I to the poem Costança by Snr. Eugenio de Castro, and the sonnet which the two lines quoted above close. There is scarcely an educated Portuguese who does not try his hand at poetry, and scarcely a Portuguese poet who escapes the temptation to renew in verse the tragic tale of Inés de Castro. The temptation is the greater in that she lived and died a stone’s throw from the halls of Coimbra, in which most Portuguese receive their education, and represents in her romantic story and sorrowful ending all that is most meigo and saudoso in Portuguese saudade. From the fifteenth to the twentieth century the Inés legend runs like a connecting link through Portuguese literature, and if it has never yet been treated with more than a pretty lyric wistfulness in minor poems beautiful but subjective, perhaps these are the basis and preparation for the great poet who will record it in a spirit of true and high Tragedy worthy of the subject and of these Alcobaça sculptures. Pedro and Inés do not even meet in the celebrated drama, Inés de Castro, by Antonio Ferreira (1528-69). He discreetly left that for the Day of Judgment, rightly feeling, no doubt, that his own powers of description and psychology would be inadequate to the occasion. So they still lie waiting separated by these barriers of incomparable sculpture in the gloomy damp Chapel of the Tombs. With relief the visitor emerges to the sunny cloisters, a part of which really dates from the days of stout-hearted King Diniz and escaped the far-spread destruction of the Peninsular War.

Portugal’s Battle Abbey, the Mosteiro da Batalha or de Santa Maria da Vitoria commemorates a victory not over the Moors, but over the invading Spaniard in the battle of Aljubarrota, King João I against King Juan I. The military genius and enthusiasm of Nun’ Alvares won the day. King João two years later married an English wife. Their children were given an English education, and became Prince Henry the Navigator, King Edward the Eloquent, one of the masters of early Portuguese prose, the Infante Pedro, also author and statesman, and the Infante Fernando, who died loyally in Africa, a happier death than that which awaited his brother Pedro, killed in a civil feud in the reign of his nephew Affonso V. English was all the order of the day, the story of King Arthur penetrated deep into Portuguese Court life and literature, the knightly Galahad was Nun’ Alvares’ model and hero. And under English influence, perhaps English workmen, was begun the great monastery which stands so nobly apart, grey traceries and pinnacles in a hollow of dark pine-covered hills. It must ever continue to be one of the chief attractions to those who visit Portugal, and it is to be hoped that it will ever retain its rustic situation, far from trains, hôtels and all those appurtenances of civilisation which usually dog the tourist’s footsteps. Indeed, this sequestered region between Leiria and Alcobaça will to many, whether they drive or walk, but especially if they walk, remain the principal among their many delightful memories of Portugal. The church of Batalha is more magnificent than that of Alcobaça, yet in some respects as severely beautiful. These lordly pillars have none of the false ornament which defaces the pillars of Belem, and the arches are of unrivalled boldness and beauty of proportion. Some of the windows have kept pieces of fine old stained glass among much modern stuff. In the Chapel of the Founders are the tombs of the Master of Aviz, João I, of his wife Philippa of Lancaster, and of their sons, Pedro, Enrique, João, and Fernando (the Infante Santo), whose untimely fate probably hastened the death of his brother, King Duarte, whose tomb is in another chapel of this church. The king was equally unwilling to give up Ceuta, for the surrender of which Prince Fernando had remained hostage, or to be responsible for his brother’s death. It was only two years after King Duarte’s death at Thomar in 1438 that the Infante’s sufferings in a Moorish dungeon ended. They were borne with a patience and intrepidity which made of him a true principe constante. His story is told in the Cronica do Infante Santo D. Fernando, by Frei João Alvarez. It is poetic justice that this splendid building should unite in death these five brothers who were as talented and as mutually affectionate as they were ill-fated—if fortunate implies long life rather than fine character or high deeds accomplished. Alcobaça for the most part scorns the Manoeline style and the church of Batalha is as purely Gothic. Its cloisters, however, and Unfinished Chapels (Capellas Imperfeitas) are the very flower of Manoeline. This strange style, typical of Portuguese restlessness and longing for new things, was introduced in the age of Portugal’s great discoveries and partly under Oriental influence. However inartistic its general effect, in details it is often beautiful, and always interesting as commemorating Portugal’s naval glories and the new animals, plants, shells, etc., found beyond the seas. The many minute designs, as well as the cryptic “Greek” inscriptions (really French: Tant que seray lealte faray) of these arches in the Unfinished Chapels are full of interest. The first view of Batalha gives an impression of greyness; but, nearer, the lower part is found to be built of stone originally snow-white, which changes to the most varied hues of yellow and grey as time and weather mould and stain it. With keen regret must travellers leave Batalha to take their way along the white road between pines to Alcobaça or Leiria.

A longer tramp or drive going East from Leiria takes one to Thomar in the very heart of Portugal, unless one goes by train to Payalvo, a few kilomètres from Thomar on the other side. The town and its river may have exchanged names since the ancient Nabantia apparently had a river called Thomar, whereas the river’s name is now Nabão. The site of Nabantia is supposed to be occupied now by the Church of Santa Maria do Olival, the oldest church of the Templars in Portugal, built by Gualdim Paes, one of the heroes of legendary feats of arms in the reign of the first King of Portugal. If in parts of the interior of Batalha the Manoeline style is seen in all its glory, in the Convent of Thomar it is the outside walls that display it in a way so bold and magnificent as to silence the carpers. It may be said that it is magnificent, but that it is not art: yet it was well that in at least one great building the outer walls should bear silent witness through the centuries to Portugal’s great achievement. Chain and grummet and rope, coral from distant seas, flowers and plants and birds from tropical lands, anchors and even—a conception as strange as its execution was happy—great bellying sails in stone, represent the story of those ships (ships of a few score tons)

The Convent contains a succession of cloisters and architecture of many centuries, the original Church of the Templars being of the twelfth century, when Affonso I relied on their strong right arms to force back the Moors mile by mile to the south. Indeed, the building is a perfect wilderness of courts and corridors. Gualdim Paes is not the only hero of these now deserted halls, for Prince Henry the Navigator was Grand Master of Thomar for over forty years, till his death in 1460, and devoted the greater part of the revenues of the Templars to further the cause he had most at heart—the extension of Christianity into lands and seas unknown. The view from the terrace is of surpassing beauty, and it seems a pity that there is no one living here permanently to enjoy it. The gently sloping hills are covered with every variety of green, from the grey of olives to the dark leaves of orange-trees. On the other side there is a view of Thomar beneath the Convent, a most curious town, of bare discomfortable look by reason of its angular buildings, steep towers and spires, severe mediaeval churches and clean streets of cobbles without side pavement. Its paper mills flourish, so that it does not stand aloof from modern industry and progress, but its inhabitants maintain an old-fashioned pride in themselves and their town.

Coimbra lies some sixty miles due north of Thomar, on the other side of the Serra de Louzã, westernmost offshoot of the Serra da Estrella. Its look is far less grey and stern than that of Thomar. Most of its buildings are whitewashed, and a few washed in pink or yellow, so that the old cathedral stands out like a great mass of rock from among the tier after tier of houses that cover the steep hill above the Mondego. Indeed, it is the exterior of the Sé Velha that is chiefly remarkable, in its massive and imposing grandeur. Coimbra has many other fine old buildings set among its serried houses. The University or Schools (Paços das Escholas) stands at the very top of the town, its clock-tower pointing skyward. Students in their long black coats, white ties, and flowing gowns (capas), bareheaded even in July, when the summer term ends, are to be seen everywhere in the narrow streets or along the river and famous walk under the poplars (the Choupal). The Faculty of Theology is now abolished, but they may study mathematics, philosophy, philology, medicine, and especially they study law as a preliminary to a political career. They enter the University younger than is usual at an English University and remain longer—about eight years. The University with its spacious quadrangles, fine halls, and library, is surrounded by a view of valleys, hills and river such as surely no other University in the world can boast. The Mondego is one of the most beautiful rivers of Northern Portugal, the land of transparent rivers and streams flowing over granite and tinged by no taint of soil. Close to the Mondego across the bridge is the remnant of the old convent of Santa Clara. It is now a farmhouse and the fine capitals of its pillars between which the oxen have their stalls are now but a few feet from the ground, so great is the volume of sand carried down by the cheias of the river. It flows so mansamente, clear and gentle, but owing to the rockiness of its bed has no elasticity, and a few hours of heavy rain suffice to turn it into a huge rushing torrent. The new Mosteiro de Santa Clara is built high above the level of the river, and the Quinta das Lagrimas stands some way from its banks. Here the Fonte dos Amores flows from a rock of ferns and flowers through a rough cross-shaped channel of stone, the iron-red stains of which are supposed to mark the place where Inés de Castro was murdered in 1355, a date hardly less celebrated in Portugal than that other fifty-five of the great Lisbon earthquake four centuries later. All these buildings are on the left bank of the river among a lovely orchard-country of orange, cherry, and pomegranate. The principal building in Coimbra itself after the Sé Velha is the Mosteiro de Santa Cruz, which was built in the twelfth century, and contains the tombs of Affonso and Sancho, the first two Kings of Portugal. Its church is much later, built by Marcos Pires in the sixteenth century. He was also the architect of the Convent’s Manoeline “Cloisters of Silence.” But Coimbra as a whole seen from the green Mondego or from the Mosteiro de Santa Clara beyond it, is a work of art, and both the town and surrounding country deserve a far more prolonged study than they usually receive.

It is in the strip of country between Tagus and Mondego that Portugal has massed her most famous and beautiful buildings, and the hurried traveller can thus within a space of about a hundred miles see Belem and Cintra and Mafra, Alcobaça, Batalha, and Thomar, Santarem, Leiria and Coimbra. But Portugal possesses a hundred other towns and towers so splendidly situated as to need little art for their beauty’s heightening. What can be finer, for instances at random, than the position of Palmella or of Covilhã, or high-perched Guarda, or Louzã, or the castle of Melgaço, or the ruins of the monastery of Crato, the early home of Nun’ Alvares, or of the castle of Almourol on its Tagus islet, the site chosen by the Romans and the castle famous in the adventures of Palmeirim of England.

The provinces of Minho and Traz os Montes, which limit Portugal to the north, have few great buildings. Minho is celebrated rather for its woods and hills and streams, its cheerful quintas in pleasant surroundings of maize and granite, than for its ancient buildings. It is not a country of large towns. Several unpretentious small towns it has along its sand and pine coast, Villa do Conde. Povoa de Varzim and Vianna do Castello, the latter beautiful in its sheltered position at the mouth of the river Lima. It is worth following up this river, which inspired the poet Diogo Bernardes with his tenderest verses, and to which his thoughts turned longingly when a captive in Africa after the battle of Alcacer Kebir, for it really is beautiful, and the quintas and villages most interesting. The capital of Minho, Braga, has few old buildings besides the Cathedral, which is said to date from the first years of Portugal’s existence, and preserves the tomb of Count Henry of Burgundy, father of Portugal’s first King.

Traz os Montes, the neighbouring province to the east, has even fewer towns. Its villages lie like those of Castille in a bleak and shadeless country. The only two with pretensions to the name of town are Villa Real, the capital, and Bragança. Both of these towns are most curious. They have rather many interesting scraps of carved wood and stone than any great buildings, but the Castle of the Braganzas is one of the finest of the many noble castles that crown the hills of Portugal. It is surrounded by a wall within which is a little village of streets and shops of its own, so that it forms a miniature town above Bragança. The wall hides these low houses, tiny shops and narrow streets from sight, and the town of Bragança itself is in a hollow, so that from some distance one sees only the great castle standing out among the bare treeless hills.

Oporto, too, has succeeded in retaining its individuality. The towns of Portugal have to thank their position on steep hills, strong sites chosen against attack of Moor or Christian, for having kept in some at least of their quarters a peculiar character of mediaeval charm. So steep are many of Oporto’s streets that a strike of tramcars—which in Portugal ascend streets truly perpendicular—leaves the citizens in a comical helplessness, infants without arms. Oporto covers several hills on the right bank of the Douro. The river is here so narrow, the granite banks so steep that from some points of the city one may look across from one bank to the other without realising that there is any break or that a river flows between. Oporto is the only city of Portugal besides Lisbon. The latest returns give a population of 194,000. The total number of foreigners is 7,210, of which 3,110 are Brazilians, 2,764 Spaniards, 289 French, 229 Germans, and 579 English (census of 1911). It is a busy industrial city, and has no parades of idleness like Lisbon, where the busy workers are crushed away into side streets and quays, for fear the foreigner should see such undignified behaviour. The true Lisboeta’s ambition is to do nothing, and to do it elegantly. On the other hand, the inhabitant of Oporto is proud of his business. He is more vigorous and active, and has a sterner and more independent outlook on life. And the two cities are rivals, sometimes almost bitterly hostile. It is the steep right bank of the Douro which has provided Oporto with its most curious and conservative quarters. There is here little scope for change. The narrow streets descend so sheerly that they have become in places mere flights of stone steps, and the coal smoke of Oporto gives them a coat of blackness. It is the most northern in look of all southern cities. If you were to transport a part of the City or some town of the North of England to the radiant sunshine and crushing heat of Portugal, you might have a like effect. Not that Oporto has not plenty of colour in detail, but the first impression is one of iron-grey and gloom. The fine old Cathedral stands immediately above these steep descents to the river. One says “old” naturally, although it retains nothing of the twelfth century, when it was founded, and much of it is quite modern: for the granite of which it is built has a look of age even in its first youth. The cloisters are five centuries old, the oldest part of the building. In the sordid surroundings and in the summer heat, which can be more oppressive at Oporto than at Lisbon, the Cathedral is a cool refuge to which, however, few of the citizens have apparently the leisure to go; or the energy, unless they live in some little black court or smothered alley in its neighbourhood. More central is the eighteenth-century Priests’ Tower—Torre dos Clerigos—nearly a twentieth of a mile high, from which all Oporto and the surrounding country can be seen. Oporto has older buildings, as the Church of São Martinho de Cedofeita, of the twelfth century, but the real pride of its citizens is in the Jardim da Cordoaria, planted fifty years ago, in the Palacio de Crystal, of the same date, built in imitation of the Crystal Palace, in the statue of Prince Henry the Navigator (1900); the “Avenue of Fountains” above the Douro and the 200 ft. high bridge of Dom Luiz I across it. On top of the left bank in rocky prominence is the old Convent of the Augustinians, Nossa Senhora da Serra do Pilar, famous in the Peninsular War, and beneath are the gaily washed cellars and armazens of the port-wine merchants in the most ancient town of Gaia.

Rarely does the foreign traveller in Portugal, rarely the Portuguese traveller on pleasure bent, cross the Tagus. Alemtejo and Algarve are relegated for the most part to the glare of the sun and to farmers, engineers and commercial travellers. Only a few cunning persons know that a whole new kingdom of pleasure and interest here awaits the enterprising. But it must be confessed that the travelling is not easy, and that the train which saunters along the single railway, zigzagging towards Algarve, takes a whole day to reach Faro from Lisbon. The foreigner coming from Badajoz sees the delightful town of Elvas, sees perhaps Estremoz or Portalegre. But many other towns and villages deserve his attention, Setubal for its position and groves of oranges, Santarem for its splendid view of the Tagus valley, Vianna do Alemtejo, a white village above wide charnecas, Monchique, high in the southernmost serra of Portugal, the ancient Silves, once a flourishing city of the Moors, Sines and Sagres for their more modern historical associations, Lagos in its beautiful sheltered bay calling to all those who like hot winters, Portimão with its no less beautiful Praia da Rocha.

Beja, in the heart of Alemtejo, rightly has an ox in its city arms, a strong frontier town transformed into a centre of agriculture since the days of King Diniz. It is seen from far across the level plain, a beautiful old town on a hill, its outline of crumbling walls and towers clear against the sky. Its castle, with the magnificent Torre de Menagem, was built, as so many other Portuguese castles, by King Diniz, who clearly saw the importance of Beja as a centre for his “nerves of the republic,” the peasants of the soil. The whole town is extraordinarily picturesque, with no lack of colour in its narrow lanes and streets. The water-carriers wheel their handcarts with holes for twenty-four or a dozen jars from far outside the town, and the peasants go out in troops to till the soil or gather the harvest, returning at nightfall to Beja’s sheltering walls, as if some sudden attack of the Moors were to be feared. This daedal of steep streets enshrines beautiful churches, as that of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, but it is the streets themselves and the lovely ruins of Beja that are its chief attraction. Both the Kings Manoel bore the title of Duke of Beja before coming to the throne, which is to say, that neither of them was the heir apparent, this being the title borne by the King’s second son.

The capital of Alemtejo is Evora, which thus keeps something of the importance that formerly made it the second city of Portugal. It has now sunk to a provincial life, although in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it figured largely in Portuguese history as a favourite residence of the Court. It remains, however, the paradise of the archaeologist and student of architecture, as it was in the time of André de Resende. Even before entering the town the old church of São Braz, of curious and forbidding exterior, arrests the attention. It is more like a turreted fortification than a church. Within the walls of the town one comes at every step on some fine old building or ruin, or rather within what remains of these magnificent walls. It was at the entrance of the town that Trancoso in the sixteenth century placed an incident in one of the most entertaining of his “profitable histories.” The poor man of his tale, reduced to the extreme of misery, persecuted by all, and made desperate by such injustice, threw himself over the battlement. Now it happened that an old paralysed man was seated taking the sun beneath the wall, and the poor man fell on top of him. He himself escaped unhurt, but he killed the old man. Here was another charge against him, and the old man’s son demanded a life for a life. The judge was the father of Sancho, of the island of Barataria. He decreed that the poor man should sit in the chair of the paralysed and take the sun beneath the wall of Evora, and that the dead man’s son should throw himself from the wall on top of him and so kill him. The whole town of Evora has been described as an archaeological museum, and the narrow streets sometimes ascending steeply with quaint wooden arcades on either side, the houses of massive stone and ironwork and green shutters, the squares and chafarizes (fountains), the hanging gardens of private houses, and the public gardens brimming with flowers, the tiny shops, dark beneath arcades, the fairs and markets, all make of Evora one of the most peculiar and interesting of cities. And there is the fine imposing sixteenth-century church of São Francisco, with its massive exterior walls and pillars, and, inside the famous chapel, the Room of Bones (Casa dos Ossos)—

The early Gothic cathedral was originally finished in 1204, but is, of course, as it stands, largely of later date. Its interior contains much fine work of both the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Almost touching it is one of the finest Roman ruins in existence, the “Temple of Diana,” nearly 2,000 years old, its magnificent Corinthian columns still supporting massive blocks of granite. It stands at the top of the town, having thus little to fear from the encroachment of modern buildings, and is outlined proudly against the sky. One may hope, since so many pillars have escaped as by a miracle from the peril of earthquake, that it may stand there during another score of centuries and escape destruction and mutilation at the hands of man, though indeed to the materialist it is as valueless as a flower, a crimson sunset, or a Cathedral evensong.

Faro is nearly two hundred miles due south of Evora, and between the two towns is all the difference between serious solid conservative Alemtejo and gay epicurean Algarve. Faro cannot vie with Evora in the matter of buildings, it has no palaces or convents, though it has an interesting little cathedral. Of the Convent of São Bento only the cloisters survive. But in its position on the sea, its lines of low houses washed in many light hues, its inner harbour, like some still sky-reflecting lagoon, its markets and the shifting scenes that enliven its streets and praças, it is one of the most charming of Portugal’s towns, and gives the traveller one of those lively impressions of contrast in which the whole land of Portugal abounds. Surely no other combines in so small a space so many varieties of natural scenery and of architecture.