Villa da Feira.
totally different language. The castle at Villa da Feira is even more unlike anything at Cintra. A huge keep of granite, the square turrets projecting slightly from the corners give it the look of a Norman castle, for the curious spires of brick now on those turrets were added later, perhaps under Dom Manoel. Inside there is now but one vast hall with pointed barrel roof, for all the wooden floors are gone, leaving only the beam holes in the walls, the Gothic fireplaces, and the small windows to show where they once were.
It is then no wonder that Cintra has been called the Alhambra of Portugal, and it is curious that the same names are found given to different parts of the two buildings. The Alhambra has a Mirador de Lindaraxa, Cintra a Jardim de Lindaraya; the Alhambra a Torre de las dos Hermanas, Cintra a Sala das Irmãs or of the Sisters—the part under the Sala dos Escudos where Affonso v. was born; while both at the Alhambra and here there is a garden called de las or das Damas.
CHAPTER VIII
OTHER MOORISH BUILDINGS
The old palace at Cintra is perhaps the only complete building to the north of the Tagus designed and carried out by Moorish workmen scarcely, if at all, influenced by what the conquering Christians were doing round them. Further south in the province of Alemtejo Moorish buildings are more common, and there are many in which, though the design and plan as well as most of the detail may be Western, yet there is something, the whitewashed walls, the round conical pinnacles, or the flat roofs which give them an Eastern look.
And this is natural. Alemtejo was conquered after the country north of the Tagus had been for some time Christian, and no large immigration of Christians ever came to take the place of the Moors, so that those few who remained continued for long in their own Eastern ways of building and of agriculture.
It is especially in and about the town of Evora that this is seen, and that too although the cathedral built at the end of the twelfth century is, except for a few unimportant details, a Western building.
Alvito.
But more completely Eastern than any one building at Evora is the castle at Alvito, a small town some thirty or forty miles to the south-west. The town stands at the end of a long low hill and looks south over an endless plain across to Beja, one of the most extensive and, in its way, beautiful views in the country.