Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/245

Rh A beautiful panorama spreads to view at the last bend of the five miles' drive from Payalvo station to Thomar. Below is a verdant plain, fertile in fruit and olive trees as a garden, and in the midst winds a river. To the left, on the hill above, the towers and battlements of an ancient castle show up strongly against the blue. The white houses of the town are at the foot of the hill. Right below the road as we slowly descend are the plain, unmistakable buildings of a large convent with its church. It is that of the Franciscans, serving to-day as a barracks, bordering the greensward and avenues of the Alameda of the Varzea Grande or cultivated plain.

Further away across the river stands out a square tower, and close to it the brown façade of a church, in which an immense rose window is conspicuous from afar. This is the mother church of the district, S. Maria dos Olivaes, built in the twelfth century, upon ruins of a Benedictine monastery of Gothic times. Roman relics unearthed in the vicinity incline archæologists to the opinion that the noted Nabantia of the Romans and Goths was situated on that side of the river. A torrential inundation is supposed to have destroyed the town, which revived in the site where we now see Thomar when D. Affonso Henriques included the fertile plain in lands he gave to the sixth, most famous Grand Master of the Templars, D. Gualdim Paes, after the battle of Ourique. With the erection of the fine castle-fortress on the brow of the steep hill, a new town sprang up between the river and the hill base, taking the name of Thomar from the river, which was given in exchange that of Nabão after the ancient city. Artists, stone-cutters, builders, carpenters, settling there without number, to carry on the great constructive works, contributed to the rapid growth of Thomar, which soon received a charter, and became renowned as the 183