Coimbra is the setting for a conference on Lusitanian culture that brings Casaubon back into contact with Brazilian friends and sets in motion an excursion to Tomar. Though the city itself is only briefly described, the visit marks a consequential turn: Casaubon arrives primed to see symbols everywhere and leaves convinced that the Templar Plan began at a real Portuguese castle.

Conference and reunion

Casaubon is invited to the conference in Coimbra less for his expertise than because his friends in Rio de Janeiro want to see him again. Lia does not accompany him: she is in her seventh month of pregnancy and chooses to stay home. The separation places Casaubon among his former Brazilian companions while Lia remains in the everyday life they share.

Casaubon spends three lively evenings with the group. On the bus back to Lisbon, their conversation turns to whether to stop at Fátima or Tomar. He favors Tomar, the castle associated with the Portuguese Templars, and the rest of the party is not keen on Fátima. The choice is casual, but for Casaubon the destination soon becomes evidence.

From Coimbra to Tomar

Casaubon understands Tomar as the place where the Portuguese Templars withdrew after the king and pope spared them trial and ruin by transforming them into the Order of Christ. The castle’s long history, its layered medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture, and its Templar associations give his visit a material specificity that the more legendary places in the Plan lack.

Inside the church, he is struck by its octagonal rotunda, modeled on the Holy Sepulcher, and by the differing forms of the Templar crosses. In a crypt, seven steps lead toward an apse beneath seven rose-shaped keystones, the largest set above a well. A guide says that occult students make pilgrimages there and that the room is reputed to have been an initiation chamber. Casaubon also encounters Hebrew book fragments in an unrestored room; the guide explains that the knights had friendly relations with the local Jewish community and points out a maze-like garden designed by the eighteenth-century Jewish architect Samuel Schwarz.

The castle as evidence

The details of Tomar converge with Casaubon’s reading of the Provins message. He interprets its reference to a first appointment at a castle as pointing not to the romantic Monsalvat or Avalon, but to Tomar: a place where Templar survivors could live freely and maintain contact with agents of another group. The castle’s historical associations and physical features become, in his eyes, confirmation of a hidden itinerary.

Casaubon leaves Tomar and Portugal convinced that the Templars had devised a Plan meant to last six hundred years and conclude in the modern era. He now treats the castle as the Plan’s starting point and begins imagining a sequence of further meetings at places where the Templars might have found protection and cooperation. Yet his own caution remains audible: the task, he reminds himself, is not to discover the Templars’ secret, but to construct it. Coimbra thus frames a shift from skeptical investigation toward active belief, as a chosen excursion supplies fresh material for the pattern Casaubon is building.