UNESCO World Heritage Monasteries
Trip Start
Oct 10, 2006
1
6
13
Trip End
Oct 17, 2006
Alcobaca, Portugal
Friday, October 13, 2006
Now that we have also seen the monastery in Batalha, I have a feeling we missed a lot of the Alcobaça monastery. The only part we explored was the cathedral and you can see just from the photos of the exterior that there is a lot more to the monastery than just a church. I guess the cathedral was enough to amaze us and we didn't think that there was anything more to see.
We spotted some ruins while we were walking around the monastery courtyard, and decided to hike up to them. Turns out we just had to walk up a steep, paved road to get to them but it somehow felt adventurous anyway
Monastery exterior
. The ruins were pretty cool and gave us a really good view of the town below.When we were up there we noticed a little covered building that Erik just had to go in. Which was fortunate as we were all curious about it but not brave enough to go in for fear it was a bum's toilet.
There was a huge hole in the floor of it so Erik lowered himself down and found a tunnel under there but we didn't have a flashlight so he didn't go in very far. While we speculated whether he was knee deep in human feces, he took several photos in the pitch black. The flash went off but not long enough for him to see anything, so he just pointed the camera and took shots at random. The pictures showed us that he was actually in an underground section of the former castle, so that was quite cool. Makes me wish I packed a flashlight so we could have seen a bit more of it.
