09:56:13 05/06/2022

We spent our first morning in Evora exploring a little more of the town. We walked around the wall toward the university and a palace where kings lived.  

We also booked a wine tour.  This part of Portugal is their wine capital.  The tour was booked for 5pm, so we decide to take in some ancient sites; there is a megalithic site about 25 minutes west of Evora.

The megalithic site is a bit off the beaten path, we drove through a small village, and on to the nearest dirt road.  The road runs through a grove of cork trees and built for a single car, but used as two lane road.  

The megalithic site is dated back to about 5000BC, roughly 7000 years old, predating the great pyramids of Egypt.  The megalithic are a series of large stones positioned in an oval shape with major stones indicating the summer and winter solstice.

There was another site nearby, this one is an ancient tomb, constructed from a series of stones tilted up forming a chamber, and stones constructed in a tunnel to access the chamber.  This was buried under dirt and recently found.  There were a number of objects, tools, pottery and the such found inside along with the remains of 30 individuals.

After visiting the megaliths and tombs, we headed for lunch, keeping it simple we  found our way to a McDonald's, in a mall.  We got food, and picked up some groceries, snacks for the road. We also got a couple of covid self tests (autotests) we both tested negative.  

Now we headed for wine country, which is east of Evora. 

Our tour is planned for 5pm, so we decided to stop at another vineyard along the way.   This vineyard creates a white and security red in clay vats. The white looks more like a rose, smells like a brandy, but tasted like a white, very unique. We got a couple of bottles here.

Note: Finding this place was tricky,  we ended up going in circles down some very narrow streets. On to the next site,  which web feed up a little mess up. I just want to say here that Google maps sucks.  We put in the name of the next vineyard we wanted to visit in Google maps and it took us to a castle.   

We went around and around looking for this vineyard, or wine shop with no luck.  We then switched to Waze and suddenly we were on the right track,  going to be using Waze from now on. 

We reached the vineyard web here we had a tour booked,  unfortunately the tour was going to be in portuguese so we decided to skip the tour and go right for the tasting.   We had our own rep showing us their wines, two reds and two whites all were really nice,  we picked one of each to take with us and a bottle of olive oil,  do good. 

Next stop Evora.  Waze guided us brilliantly back to the hotel.  We had the hotel make a reservation for us at the bistro we hoped to eat the night before.   Great food and wine. 

If to Nazare Tomorrow