Évora by train and foot: a solo day trip from Lisbon

The train from Lisbon’s Oriente station to Évora takes one hour and forty minutes. I bought the ticket on the CP (Comboios de Portugal) website the night before — €13.10 one way, €24.30 return — and found a window seat in a nearly empty carriage. February, a Tuesday. The Alentejo unfolded.

Why Évora on a winter day

Évora in February is not the Évora of the summer brochures. There are no tour groups filling the Praça do Giraldo. The cork oaks and olive trees in the countryside south of Montemor are bare and pale. The light is low and clear in a way that summer haze prevents.

I had been to Sintra, Cascais, and Arrábida already. I wanted somewhere that felt less like a day trip destination and more like a real Portuguese city that happened to contain remarkable things. Évora, a UNESCO World Heritage city of 55,000 people, is exactly that.

Arriving and orienting

The train station is about 1.5 kilometres from the historic centre — a flat, straightforward walk. There is a taxi rank outside if you’re not inclined to walk, but in February weather (about 13 degrees Celsius, some cloud) the walk is pleasant and gives you a sense of the transition from modern outskirts to the walled old city.

The historic centre is mostly pedestrianised and small enough to walk entirely on foot. I did the whole day without any form of transport within the city. Everything important is within about 800 metres of the central Praça do Giraldo.

The Roman Temple

The Temple of Diana — actually a Roman temple of the 1st or 2nd century, the Diana attribution is contested — stands in the centre of Évora on a low platform, fourteen Corinthian columns of local granite and white marble still standing. It is free to view from outside. It is, by any reasonable assessment, extraordinary.

Most Roman remains in Portugal are in ruins or below the surface. This one is not. The columns are intact to their full height. Standing in front of it on a cold February morning with no one else around except a man walking a small dog, I had the feeling that sometimes occurs at genuinely ancient things: a slight disorientation, a sense of scale that photos don’t convey.

There are some benches nearby. I sat for twenty minutes.

The Chapel of Bones

The Igreja de São Francisco contains the Capella dos Ossos — the Chapel of Bones — built by Franciscan monks in the 17th century using the bones of approximately 5,000 people from the surrounding cemeteries. The walls and columns are covered floor-to-ceiling with femurs and skulls arranged in patterns. Two complete mummified bodies hang at the entrance. The inscription above the door reads: “Nos ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos” — “We bones that are here, wait for yours.”

Entry costs €7 (2024 prices, verify current). The chapel is small and the experience is brief — perhaps twenty to thirty minutes — but it is genuinely unlike anything else in Portugal and probably in Europe. The monks were making a specific theological argument about mortality, and the argument is coherent.

For a guided Évora day trip covering the Roman Temple, Chapel of Bones, and more, this tour runs from Lisbon

What I would say: go without reading too much about it. The first impression of walking into that room is the thing.

Lunch and the Alentejo table

Évora has excellent food, which is a slightly unexpected thing to discover on a solo day trip. The Alentejo cuisine — açorda (bread soups), migas, black pork, local cheeses, Alentejo wine — is among Portugal’s best and least exported.

I ate at a restaurant on Rua do Cano near the Roman aqueduct: half a portion of migas com carne de porco (bread crumble with black pork) and a glass of the house Alentejo red. €12.50 total, including bread that was already on the table (the couvert was €1.50, mentioned by the waiter before I could ask). The honest Lisbon guide applies throughout Portugal: the couvert is legal and standard, you can refuse it, but it’s not a scam.

The Alentejo wine deserves its own mention. The region produces some of Portugal’s best reds — deep, tannic, complex — from grapes like Aragonez (Tempranillo), Alicante Bouschet, and Trincadeira. A glass at lunch is €3-4. You can do considerably worse.

The megalithic circuit

Évora is surrounded by megalithic monuments — dolmens and standing stone circles (antas and cromeleques) that predate the Roman temple by four thousand years. The most significant is the Almendres Cromlech, about 15 kilometres outside the city, a grouping of roughly 95 standing stones in an oval arrangement.

Getting there without a car requires either a taxi (about €25 return with waiting time) or one of the organised half-day tours from Évora. I took a taxi and negotiated the return trip with the driver — €30 total, which seemed fair given the distance.

The Almendres stones, in February, with nobody else present: this was the moment of the day. The stones are mostly granite, ranging from knee height to chest height, arranged in a configuration that archaeologists believe was used for astronomical observation around 6000 BC. The location — a low cork oak hillside — is quiet enough that the wind in the trees is the loudest sound.

The train home at dusk

I was back at Évora station at 17:30 for the 18:00 train. The journey back to Lisbon passes through the same landscape but the light is entirely different — low and gold, the Alentejo plain going amber, the cork oaks casting long shadows. By the time the train arrived at Oriente at 19:40, it was dark and the station was full of commuters.

The Évora day trip guide has a more systematic breakdown of the options, including the wine-focused version that adds tastings in the region. The day trip comparison tool can help you decide which day trip fits your interests best.

For a guided experience that combines more sites efficiently:

Full-day Évora and Megaliths tour from Lisbon, including Roman sites and the Almendres circuit

Évora is worth a full day, possibly two if you want to explore the surrounding villages. As a solo day trip from Lisbon by train, it was the best-value day I had in Portugal on that trip. Quiet, specific, genuinely ancient, and back in Lisbon before dinner.