Portugal
Four Portuguese places in Novissima, and what’s true about them
The Chapel of Bones in Évora, the bats of the Joanina Library, the well at Regaleira and the cliff at Cabo da Roca: the facts behind four settings.
Most of the settings in Novissima are real. The novel adds one invention to each: a hiding place for half of a broken bronze coin that was never there. Everything else below is true as far as the sources go, and where they disagree this piece says so.
Évora: the Chapel of Bones
The Chapel of Bones is a small room beside the entrance of the Church of St Francis (Igreja de São Francisco) in Évora. Franciscan friars made it from the bones of roughly 5,000 people. Sources disagree on whose bones they were, and on exactly when it was built. Treat any date you read with care.
The chapel has three spans, 18.7 metres long and 11 wide, with eight pillars. The walls and pillars are faced with bones and skulls held together with cement. Over the entrance, an inscription is usually rendered “We bones that are here await yours”. In Portuguese it reads Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos. On the vault, in Latin, is a line from Ecclesiastes: “Better is the day of death than the day of birth”. Two dried bodies, one of a child, lie in glass cases.
Coimbra: the Joanina Library
The Joanina Library sits at the heart of the University of Coimbra and is named for its founder, King John V. Construction began in 1717 and is listed as running to 1728, and the first books arrived in 1750. It is Baroque, and the ceilings were painted by two Lisbon artists, Simões Ribeiro and Vicente Nunes.
It also has bats. A colony lives inside the building and eats insects at night, which helps protect the books. Each night staff cover the furniture with leather sheets, and each morning the library is cleaned of droppings.
Sintra: the Quinta da Regaleira
António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro bought the estate in 1892 and had the Italian architect Luigi Manini design it as a garden full of symbols. Building began in 1904 and was mostly finished by 1910.
The famous part is the Initiation Well. It is an inverted tower 27 metres deep, with a spiral staircase of nine flights, and its bottom opens into tunnels that lead to grottoes. The popular story is that blindfolded initiates went down it holding a sword to the heart. That is believed rather than documented, and the encyclopedia entry that repeats it carries a warning about its own sources. Treat it as legend. The landscape of Sintra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1995.
Cabo da Roca: the cliff
Cabo da Roca is the westernmost point of continental Europe, at roughly 9°30′ west, in the municipality of Sintra and inside the Sintra-Cascais Natural Park. The cliffs there are more than 100 metres high. A lighthouse has operated on them since 1772. A monument at the cape carries a line of verse by Luís de Camões about the place where the land ends and the sea begins.
One more, and it has no roof
The first real place in the book is in Lisbon: the Carmo church, which lost its roof in 1755. That story has its own article.
If you are travelling
Opening times, ticket rules and what you may photograph all change. Some of these places limit visitor numbers. Check each site’s own page before you go.
The Prologue and Chapter 1 of the novel are free to read on this site.