Evora and Silves

I am having trouble getting connected to the internet. The hotels that Jo chooses don´t have high-speed connections so I am sorry to have been off the air for a couple of days. I will have to add photos to this blog later because I am working on the hotel´s computer.

We are well into the Algarve now. Yesterday we travelled most of the day on the bus to Evora. We got there fairly late in the afternoon and whipped around all the sights before dinner time so that we could move on today.

There is a Roman ruin there. It used to be the capital of the region so it has many splendid churches as well as palaces and parks.

One church has a most unusual exterior with a couple of hysterical men teetering on the roof.

In the cathedral I spotted a painting of the last supper with what looked like suckling pig on a plate in front of Jesus. Or was it a small, roasted dog?

This morning we continued by bus to the south. The countryside looks wonderful. It is green and covered with wild flowers. The storks are nesting on any high, flat platform. We went past a field with cattle egret rookery where they were sitting in a line of trees. The trees looked, from a distance, as though they were adorned with large white flowers.

Silves is where Jo´s dad was born. His grandfather owned property and a butcher shop. Granddad would fatten the cattle on his grass before selling them in the shop. In his middle years he got appendicitis. This was before antibiotics and the operation was very dangerous and mostly fatal. So before the operation, he sold all his property and distributed the funds. He survived the operation and died poor. There is a lesson there.

Silves, when we first came here 35 years ago was a backwater being quite a distance from the ocean. Now it is a thriving tourist town just off the interstate. The castle goes back to Roman times and the Moors were here for 500 years. The old town looks Moorish in that none of the streets are straight but all the houses look Portuguese. There is a very fine archeological museum.

Jo asked there about his relatives and was told that one with his family name (Viola not Martins) was the leader of the local communist party. . . . sounds like family to me.