Chapel of Bones, Evora, Portugal

· Portugal Évora
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Today we visited the Chapel of Bones and the Church of St. Francis. The Chapel gets its name because the interior walls are covered and decorated with human skulls and bones. The Capela dos Ossos was completed by Franciscan friars in 1816. An estimated 5,000 corpses were exhumed to decorate the walls of the chapel. The bones, which came from ordinary people who were buried in Évora’s medieval cemeteries, were arranged by the Franciscans in a variety of patterns. I must say they did a great job of decorating with human bones.

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