Architecture
The castle crowns the escarpment of Serra d' Ossa, with a commanding view of the local and distant routes, dominating one of the largest squares in Portugal: the municipality of Estremoz.
An unusual rectangular building, the castle includes circular towers molded into the structure, providing the castle with an aggressive and powerful characteristics. The building is much larger at the base, and is chamfered to the height of its three storeys, and crowned by large merlons. The three floors are clearly delineated by a ring-shaped cornice at each level, typical of the Manueline style, these cornices are sculpted into a rope, tied at the frontispiece of the structure. At various places along the cylindrical towers are canon emplacements, narrower to the interior, that provide an image that is bellicose and somber. On each storey there is a rectangular window, except on the ground floor exposed to the north, where a portico is fixed.
In the large salon on the first floor, the vaulted ovular ceiling is supported by four columns, and raised into a mess of sculpted veins. A similar lattice, though smaller, is used in the remaining floors. By the cylindrical towers in the west, a circular staircase provides access to successive floors.
Read more about this topic: Evoramonte Castle
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)