Chapel of Souls at night from our balcony.
Monday turned out to be a little rainy, but we were able to sneak in a trip to the grocery store during a lull.
Tuesday was a chilly and partly cloudy. Stacey got a pedicure, we did our Portuguese lessons and in the afternoon decided to take a walk before the expat happy hour.
There are numerous parks and cemeteries. Today's walk led us to Prado do Repouso Cemetery
This is a very old and lovely cemetery and unlike those in The States. There are many more mausoleums and fewer headstone type graves. There's everything from traditional stucco, marble, tile and some very interesting art deco style. There are some more modern structures as well.
This is called 'grotto' style
There is a beautiful walkway at one end of the cemetery. It mixes a columbarium wall or niche wall. Upon further research, we learned, "Burial niches or loculi (singular: loculus) the individual compartments, a term going back to Roman catacombs Wall crypts — when they contain full caskets rather than urns, as well as Ossuary wall sometimes used more loosely. The entire stacked structure is often called a "wall of the dead" — and in Portuguese/Spanish cemetery tradition, these are extremely common and have a specific cultural name: "nichos" (pronounced 'nee-shoosh'). You'll see them all over Portugal, Spain, and Latin America, typically decorated with flowers, photos, and mementos."
There is also a cat colony.
This one was way more interested in the mausoleum than the people strolling the cemetery.
We will explore this in the future with some frequency. There's a lot of history here, some great sketching to be had and appreciation of different types of architecture to be enjoyed, and it is so calm and peaceful. We'll stop visiting when that is no longer the case.
We meandered our way back to the apartment and saw a lot of really cool tile selections.
This building had an interesting run of inset tiles and ended in a beautiful arc.
This hidden gem was not yet open as it was too early for aperitivi
And of course, street art:
Yes, I'm aware (Stacey) I caught my finger in the bottom, but I really liked the undulation of the street and didn't want to crop it out.
4 comments:
Love the photos. What a lovely cemetery. Reminds me of a place I explored in Buenos Aires. The tiles and road are beautiful!
I counted four kitties?!
It's such a beautiful space.
There are five as the one at the booth has a buddy hidden behind him. However, as we came around the booth there were at least 3 more lurking, trying to catch pigeons.
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