Alentejo is the part of Portugal that looks as if someone had ironed it. South and east of the Tagus, the land rolls out in low swells of wheat, olive and cork oak, with white villages on the hills and storks nesting on the chimneys, and Évora sits in the middle of it, about 130 kilometres east of Lisbon. It is a walled city of some fifty-five thousand, and for riders it is the natural pause in a long day of empty road.
The country around it is the montado, an open woodland of cork oaks and holm oaks with pasture beneath, where black Iberian pigs root for acorns and the cork is stripped from the trunks by hand every nine years or so, leaving the bare trunks a dull orange for a season. The roads that cross it are some of the most relaxed in western Europe: long, smooth straights, easy bends and wide skies, with few cars outside the towns. Distances are large and services thin, so fill the tank in Évora rather than gambling on the next village. Summer heat can reach forty degrees and more by mid-afternoon, and the hours between two and five are best spent under a roof; spring, when the fields are green and covered with poppies, and autumn, with the first rain and the cork harvest done, are far more comfortable.
A few kilometres west of the city, at Almendres, stand the biggest group of standing stones in the Iberian Peninsula, a cromlech of nearly a hundred granite monoliths set out on a hillside by Neolithic farmers around six thousand years ago. It is easy to reach down a track off the road and almost always quiet, with the stones casting long shadows at dawn and dusk. The nearby Anta Grande do Zambujeiro, a huge burial chamber, gives a similar sense of deep time.
Évora's food is simple and filling: migas, açorda, slow-cooked pork with clams, and sheep's cheese with wines from the surrounding estates. Dinner is late by northern standards, and many kitchens close in the afternoon.
Arrive in the early evening, when the heat softens, the stone of the old walls turns golden and the cafés fill.