Monsaraz | Alentejo | Portugal
Monsaraz is a timeless hilltop village where medieval walls, Templar legacy, and Alentejo tradition come together in one of Portugal’s most captivating historical landscapes — and where you can gaze at one of the clearest, starriest skies in Europe, under the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve.
Monsaraz was a medieval fortified settlement built after the Christian reconquest to consolidate the Alentejo border. King Afonso III had gone south and reconquered the entire area south of the Tagus as far as the Algarve in 1249, and it was now necessary to protect and consolidate the border of all this territory to the east.
Many of these border areas prior to the reconquest were threatened by Arab offensives and were entrusted to the Military Orders. The castle with its five towers began during the reign of King Afonso III with the participation of the Templars. In the following reign, King Dinis built the keep and the entire urban fence. In the following reign, Ferdinand built the inner curtain wall separating the castle citadel from the town houses.
As in Nisa and other towns on the Alentejo border, this is a Bastide, i.e. a planned town, following a geometric pattern. This happened not only in Portugal, but also in southern France, eastern Germany, southern Italy and Secilia and also on the Aragon-Navarre border in Spain. These were sparsely populated and politically unstable regions that had recently been conquered.
This town is a must-see, not so much for its religious architecture, but for the examples of traditional Alentejo architecture that have been preserved.
In the 1930s, the town was falling into disrepair and desertion. In 1946, the DGEMN classified the village as a National Heritage Site and decreed it a Special Protection Zone (ZEP).