Historical and religious architecture and sites

Aljezur Castle – Castelo de Aljezur

This is a Moorish castle built in the 10^th century to protect the ancient river port that used to provide direct access to the sea – it was one of the last Moorish strongholds in the Algarve to be captured during the re-conquest in the 13^th century. There are two towers that are still standing, as well as the ramparts and a cistern, once you reach up there you’ll get to see a wonderful panoramic view of the surroundings and understand why the fortress was built there.

Church of Our Lady of Mercy – Igreja da Misericordia

This one will be rather hard to miss seeing as how it’s located in the historic town center – which you should be visiting anyway. The initial church was built in the 16^th century but it needed to be rebuilt in the 18^th century following the 1755 earthquake – the only feature from the old church is its Renaissance doorway.

Church of Our Lady of Dawn – Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Alva

This is called the New Church, even though it was built in the 18^th century as well. it features some rather noteworthy features are the 18^th century statue of the patron saint of Aljezur, Our Lady of Dawn, and behind the main altar, there’s a 16^th century Manueline font and two 17^th century statues.

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The town features a couple of interesting monuments, including the home and a monument dedicated to the man who changed much of the face of Portugal – Duarte Pacheco. His monument at the top of the Avenida 25 de Abril reflects Pacheco’s commitment to modernize the architecture of Salazar’s Portugal. The place also features a castle – as most of the Algarve destinations feature one sort of fortification or another – however Loule also has a salt mine that you can visit which has some huge galleries from 230 to 270 metres long that will sometimes house art exhibitions.

Heading westwards you can go to Silves and its extraordinarily magnificent Moorish castle, a city that prospered greatly while it was the capital of the Moorish Al-garb.

Silves was something of a cultural centre during that hay-day, a centre for poets, chroniclers and lawmakers. The city was re-conquered by D. Sancho, however it wasn’t reclaimed by Christians till 1242.

Over in Portimao, the Municipal Museum makes good use of an old canning factory which is located near the museum-home of a former President of the country who was a businessman, painter, author and diplomat. He agreed to run for the Presidency only under pressure from his friends who then promptly betrayed him.

Just like Tavira, Lagos knew how to maximize its position and the many ships that set off from Lagos on the voyages of discovery returned with ivory, gold, silver and slaves. As a result of this influx of trade materials, rich merchants moved here and a lot of money went into building their houses and into building churches – unfortunately much of this wealth of architecture was lost in the aftermath of the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis of 1755.

This pretty much concludes our Algarve guide from a history point of view, obviously there could be many more things that we could talk about, but we kept it to the general dates and mentions, we’ll talk about the other in the future, till then however, keep our Algarve car rental services in mind while on your trip there, you won’t regret it.