Casas Pintadas: the painted gallery next door

Fifty metres from our front door, down the Travessa das Casas Pintadas, is one of Évora's least-known treasures: a vaulted gallery whose walls are covered with early 16th-century paintings of real and imaginary animals.

What you will see

The upper band is a bestiary in the medieval tradition: birds, hares and foxes alongside a basilisk, a mermaid and a harpy. Below runs a frieze of grotesques in the new Renaissance taste. A 2016 technical study by researchers from the University of Évora concluded that both bands were painted as true fresco, on wet lime plaster.

Whose house was it?

For centuries the building was known as the Casas de Vasco da Gama, and tradition holds that the navigator lived here after his voyage to India. More recent art-historical research points instead to D. Francisco da Silveira, master of the horse to King Manuel I, as the man who commissioned the paintings, around 1513. In 1591 the house was absorbed into the neighbouring headquarters of the Inquisition. It has been listed as a Property of Public Interest since 1950, and was restored in 1964 by the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation.

Our street has a story too

Rua Dona Isabel takes its name from the Infanta Isabel, daughter of King João I, who is said to have taken refuge in our house in 1415 to escape the plague in Lisbon. The street follows a Roman road towards the gate now called the Arco de Dona Isabel.

How to visit

Entry to the gallery and its garden is through the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation's modern art museum. Our reception can tell you the current opening times.

Staying with us puts the Casas Pintadas, the Roman Temple and the Cathedral within a few minutes' walk. See our apartments · About the house

Cover photo: DiogoBaptista, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.