Faro's old town: from the Chapel of Bones to the city gate: a self-guided walk

By Alleytale

Faro on foot, from the Carmelite chapel to the walled old town

Old Faro keeps its layers on show: a Jesuit college turned theatre, a Manueline church given a new façade, a neoclassical arch with an Islamic doorway tucked inside it, a cathedral destroyed in 1596, a convent turned museum.

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The stops

1. 1Capela dos Ossos

   This ossuary chapel belongs to the 18th-century Carmelite church of Nossa Senhora do Carmo and sits behind the main church. It was inaugurated in 1816 and is built from the bones of more than 1,000 Carmelite friars, with 1,245 skulls among them. Above the entrance a Portuguese inscription translates as "Stop here and consider, that you will reach this state too."

   

2. 2Teatro Lethes

   This building began as a Jesuit college, and the college closed in 1759 when the Jesuits were banished. It opened as a theatre on 4 April 1845, Queen Maria II's birthday, and was named after Lethe, a river of the underworld in Greek mythology. The Latin words on the façade, monet oblectando, mean "it instructs with amusement."

   

3. 3Igreja da Misericórdia

   This church began around 1499 as the Manueline Church of the Holy Spirit, and in 1583 Bishop Afonso de Castelo Branco had it rebuilt to house the brotherhood of the Misericórdia. The Genoese architect Francesco Saverio Fabri later reworked its façade for Bishop Francisco Gomes do Avelar. Inside, the plan is a Greek cross under a central dome.

   

4. 4Arco da Vila

   Bishop Francisco Gomes do Avelar ordered this neoclassical triumphal arch, which was inaugurated on 25 October 1812. It has Ionic columns, and in the central niche stands a marble statue of Saint Thomas Aquinas that was made in Italy. Go through it and look at the north wall, where an older horseshoe-arch doorway from the city wall is probably from the 11th century, in the Islamic period.

   

5. 5Sé de Faro

   The origins of the present cathedral go back to the middle of the 13th century. In 1596 the church was destroyed by the Earl of Essex, and what stands here today is a mix of Gothic, Baroque and Portuguese Plain Style architecture. In the 18th century Johann Heinrich Hulenkampf installed the organ.

   

6. 6Convento de Nossa Senhora da Assunção

   The museum fills a convent built in the first half of the 16th century for a community of Poor Clare nuns, in the place of Faro's old Jewish quarter. Its Renaissance cloister was designed by the master mason Afonso Pires and finished in 1548, with gargoyles on its buttresses. The nuns left in 1834, and in 1973 the building was partly converted into a museum.

   

7. 7Arco do Repouso

   This was one of the gates into Faro's medieval walls, and it dates to the Almohad period, the 12th or 13th century. In the 13th century, when the Christians were reconquering the region, its Moorish defenders reinforced the entrance with two albarrã towers. In the 18th century a small chapel was built inside one of the two arches for an image of Nossa Senhora do Repouso, and legend says King Afonso III's troops rested here after taking the city.

   

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