Portugal: Evora – Skull Chapel

Now this is something you don’t see every day – a chapel inside a church decorated with over 5000 skulls and accompanying bones. Know as Capela dos Ossos, it dates back to the 16th century when a Evora was booming as major royal trading hub and one of the wealthiest cities in Portugal. Influx of people resulted in the city running out of burial places for the dying and the land for the living – so the local monks decided to exhume bodies of the dead, cleaned and sorted all the bones and skulls, and then plastered it all around the chapel at the Church of St. Francis. The arrangement is very geometric and symmetric, columns are layers with skulls, vault ceilings are adorned with smaller skulls, and so on. The message is that of “memento mori” – “remember you must die” – so that you should try to excel in life.