We spent the first morning at Monsaraz waiting for the sun to rise. Extremely cold and we weren’t prepared for these freezing temperatures. But an hour later the sun had risen and warmed up the town and inside its protective walls it started to warm up.
At one end of Monsaraz was the castle. It was open 24 hours, so immediately after sunrise I walked over and entered through the gate at the left.
The town is very small and you can more or less see all of it in the following image. It is built on a ridge, so it has a couple of streets parallel to the ridge with the castle at one end and a church tower at the other end.
Outside the town walls on the north side – opposite the castle – the town continued with a few more houses and a chapel – Capela de São Bento – that can clearly be seen on the left image below. Jen and I went up to the chapel and photographed it at sunset and also looking back towards the castle. We had dinner in a restaurant nearby, and as the sun set and the moon rose, I captured the atmosphere of sunset. When I see those images now, I can still taste the wine we drank at dinner.
As Jen and I sat down to look at the menu and sample the wine, the sun set and the full moon rose above the lake. What a difference to the images I captured a month earlier of the moon in Norway (that time in the morning as the moon was setting). I couldn’t resist comparing the images to each other:
