Chapel of Bones in Évora: Who Built It, and What Its Sign Says

The Franciscans have a long history in Évora. According to the Igreja de São Francisco's own history, the friars arrived in the city in 1224. The Chapel of Bones belongs to that Franciscan complex.

The church's official page on the chapel dates it to the seventeenth century. Some accounts place the building's structure in the sixteenth century, but the chapel as a bone chapel is generally placed in the seventeenth. A study by Fernando Magalhães of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, "Capelas dos Ossos e Património Macabro," cites historian José António Falcão in crediting its construction to three Franciscan friars.

Why build a chapel out of bones? The church's answer is that it was designed to make visitors think about human transience and about how to live a Christian life. For friars, a room of skulls was a sermon without a preacher. It belongs to the same Christian tradition of keeping death in view that you can read about in our guides to memento mori and skulls in Christianity.

The inscription above the entrance reads:

> "Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos."

Rev. Carlos A. Martins translates it as "We bones that are here await yours." The Portuguese rhymes, ossos with vossos, which gives it the snap of a proverb, and it speaks in the first person. The bones are talking.

What they say is simple. Everyone who walks through the door will one day be bones too. The line is not a threat and not a joke, though it has a dry wit that is hard to miss. It is an invitation, in the voice of the dead, to take that fact seriously before going inside.

Inside the chapel hangs a sonnet that picks up where the sign leaves off. It begins:

> "Aonde vais, caminhante, acelerado?"

In plain English, that first line asks, "Where are you going, traveler, in such a hurry?" The poem asks the hurried visitor to stop, to remember the dead and to reflect on mortality. Its message is that pausing to think about death is not a delay; it moves the soul forward on its spiritual road.

The sonnet is attributed to Father António da Ascensão Teles, who served as parish priest of São Pedro from 1845 to 1848, according to the Portuguese Wikipedia entry on the chapel. That attribution is the usual one, and it places the poem two centuries after the chapel itself, a later voice joining the conversation the friars started.

The number you will see most often is about 5,000 people, counted mainly by their skulls. That figure is an estimate, not an exact count, and it is the one Magalhães gives. The church's own description speaks more loosely of "some thousands" of bones and skulls.

The remains came from burial spaces connected with the convent and from Évora's churches and cemeteries. Magalhães says they probably came especially from São Francisco itself, one of the city's principal burial places. In other words, these were the people of Évora, buried in and around their churches, whose bones were gathered from those burial grounds into the chapel.

Visitors often spend so long on the walls that they forget the ceiling. The church dates its frescoes to 1810. They include biblical symbols and the instruments of the Passion of Christ, the objects linked to his crucifixion. The ceiling ties the bones below to the Christian story the chapel was built to tell: death is real, and for the friars, it was not the end.

Among the skulls are two whole bodies, naturally dried and partly mummified: an adult and a child. They have been in the chapel a long time; the University of Évora notes that mummies were documented there in 1750. Where they came from is unknown.

A legend grew up around them. In the popular story, they were an unfaithful father and son, cursed by the woman they had betrayed, who was wife to one and mother to the other. It is a legend, not history.

In 2019, the University of Évora reported what scientific study of the bodies showed. The adult is a woman, aged roughly 30 to 50, and the child is a girl no older than about two and a half. For many years the bodies hung on the chapel wall. During the chapel's rehabilitation they were moved into glass cases, which is how visitors see them now.

Évora's chapel became a model for later bone chapels in southern Portugal, according to Magalhães, who identifies chapels or ossuaries at Campo Maior, Alcantarilha, Faro, Lagos, Monforte and elsewhere in the region.

The best documented of these is in Campo Maior. Its municipality says the chapel was probably promoted by the Confraria das Almas, a religious confraternity, around 1766. A popular story links its bones to the victims of a 1732 powder-magazine explosion, but the municipality says the bones are associated with the churchyard of the Igreja Matriz and that archaeological and anthropological evidence does not support the explosion story. The municipality lists the chapel as open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:00 to 17:00, with closures on certain holidays.

Faro has its own Capela dos Ossos at the Igreja do Carmo. Bone chapels also exist well beyond Portugal, from Austria's painted skulls in the Hallstatt Bone House to Sedlec in Czechia, and our guide to ossuaries around the world gathers many of them in one place.

The Capela dos Ossos is at the Igreja de São Francisco, Praça 1º de Maio, Évora. The church describes itself as a private religious institution, and the chapel is part of a combined visit with the church's museum areas.

The church's official site lists a combined ticket at 7 euros for adults, 5 euros for visitors up to 25 and seniors over 65, and 15 euros for a family ticket. Évora's municipal page, updated 21 July 2023, lists opening hours of 09:00 to 18:30 from June through September and 09:00 to 17:00 from October through May, with closures on the afternoon of 24 December, on 25 December, 1 January and Easter Sunday. Confirm current hours and prices with the church before you go.

Inside, you are in a chapel and a burial place. The people in its walls came from the city's own burial places, and the space was built for quiet thought.

If the sign over the door stayed with you, the same idea runs through the friars' chapel in Rome, the Capuchin Crypt, and through the remains gathered in the Paris Catacombs. For the thinking behind all of them, start with memento mori.