Visiting Faro - Our last few days in Portugal

We said goodbye to Lisbon and took a bus to Faro, a small town on the southern coast of Portugal.  We spent two nights in a cheap hotel there and really only had one full day to explore. So, we tried to make the best of the time we had there.  Right after getting off the bus and finding our hotel, we went to see the Capella dos Ossos (Bone Chapel) in the back of the Carmo Church.  After walking through the church, you go outside to a small courtyard where there is a chapel attached to the back of the church.  It is made of real human femurs with mortar along with some skulls.  The floor was made of tombs so you are surrounded by the dead.  

The bones here are the remains of over 1200 monks.  There are other bone chapels in Portugal and apparently it was common to move bones from cemeteries to ossuaries throughout Catholic Europe.  

On the other side of these doors (below) there was a schoolyard so the whole time we could hear children laughing, crying and screaming.  Creepy enough for you?

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On Saturday, we took a 40 min ferry ride to Deserta Island, which has about 11km of beaches.  There are a few tiny fisherman shacks and one big seafood restaurant close to where you get off the ferry.  There were wooden walkways and trails that meander across the dry flat terrain.  The beaches we saw were small and covered with shells.  There is so much space to spread out on the island so you feel like you're the only ones there, unless you go to that one restaurant...

We lucked out because it was overcast and there was no shade on the island.

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