Castelo de Lagos

Lacóbriga, the fortified town here, withstood a Roman siege in 76 BC but was taken during that century and walled by the Romans on a quadrangular plan. In the Roman and Visigothic periods the old quarter was probably laid out much like a Roman military camp, roughly square within its walls, its streets and buildings on a grid, the urban centre at the south-west corner and a fortress on the north-east side. In 716 the Umayyads took the town and renamed it Halaq Al-Zawaia. Lagos lost ground to Silves under Islamic rule, but it guarded one of the approaches to that city, and it is for that reason that a castle is thought to have been built here, probably in the early caliphal period; Abd al-Rahman III, caliph of Cordoba, took the town in 929 and provided it with towers. No trace of those structures has been found. The walls were probably rebuilt in the tenth century as a double enceinte with an internal corridor between the two lines. The alcáçova stood in a position of great importance beside the river quay; the Castelo dos Governadores may have been adapted from it, and it in turn from the Roman and Visigothic fortress that had held the same ground.

Lagos was surrendered to King Sancho I in 1189 after the fall of Silves, reconquered in 1191 by the Almohad caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur, and retaken in 1241 by Paio Peres Correia. Little reliable information survives about the town's defences under Muslim rule.

King Afonso III (1248-1279) began work on the walls, continued by King Denis (1279-1325) and by Afonso IV (1325-1357) and probably completed during the fourteenth century. They enclosed the roughly octagonal old burgh known as the Vila-a-dentro, with three main gates probably defended by torres albarrãs. From 1361 the town was separated from the jurisdiction of Silves.

Nearby Sagres was one of the support bases for the conquest of North Africa and for the operations of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), and Lagos had both a harbour and yards in which caravels and other vessels were built. The expedition to take Ceuta sailed from the harbour here in 1415, vessels for the discovery of Madeira in 1419 and the Azores in 1427, and in 1434 the ship in which Gil Eanes crossed Cape Bojador; Afonso V's expeditions against Ksar es-Seghir, Asilah and Tangier followed in 1458 and 1472.

Excavation near the Porta da Vila uncovered two towers and a stretch of the medieval wall, together with a pit holding five skeletons, one of them showing signs of great violence, and a manilha, the metal ring used as currency in the buying of slaves. The archaeologist Elena Morán notes that this pit lay inside the walled perimeter, unlike the common grave outside the walls at the Gafaria. A sixteenth-century paving was laid over the pit, and it may be associated with the building of the old jail, in use in the sixteenth century, which for the cells on its ground floor may have been the town's first council house.

In 1475 the Court recorded complaints about the poor condition of the Algarve's fortifications, Lagos among them, and rebuilding began across the region. John II moved the Company of Guinea from Lagos to Lisbon in 1481-1482, and he and his successor worked on the defences and endowed the town with an aqueduct built between 1490 and 1521. Manuel I granted a second foral charter in 1504, reformed a decade later, which set in train the building of the governors' residence.

Under the expansionist project of King Sebastian, Lagos was raised to a city in 1573, capital of the Kingdom of the Algarve and seat of its Captains General and Governors; Cardinal Henry confirmed the title in 1579. The castle, enlarged in the sixteenth-century works, housed those governors from the second half of that century and has been known since as the Castelo dos Governadores.

The defences were strengthened during the Iberian Union. In 1587 the city fiercely opposed the landing of Francis Drake's forces and drove him to a weaker point along that coast, at Sagres. The damage done by the English artillery, and the fear of further raids, led to the rebuilding and modernisation of the defences. A second line of walls, the Cerca Renascentista, planned from the start of the sixteenth century, was finished either in the reign of John III, who died in 1557, or in 1598. The most heavily fortified medieval stretch was modernised in 1621, and in 1643, a year after conservation work at the Restoration, a proposal was approved for a large pentagonal work with five bastions at its corners south of the city.

The city and its defences declined after 1640, and in 1755 the earthquake and the tsunami that followed destroyed the castle and most of the walls. The civil and military governments were moved to Tavira, less affected by the disaster. The church of Santa Maria da Graça, which stood on high ground on the south-west side of the city beside the Baluarte da Porta da Vila, was destroyed in the same earthquake. The castle was never rebuilt and was partly converted into a hospital; at the end of the century the city centre shifted from the old Praça de Armas to Cano Square.

In the nineteenth century the city grew again on the fish trade. Writing in Portugal Antigo e Moderno, published in 1873, the historian Pinho Leal described walls that were high, with nine bastions towards the river and four gates on that side - São Gonçalo, Caes, São Roque and Nova - and four more to landward, the Porta de Portugal, the Postigo, the Quartos and the Porta da Vila. He also recorded ten coastal forts and batteries under the military governor, among them Nossa Senhora da Luz, Vera Cruz da Figueira, Meia Praia, São Luís de Almádena, Ponta da Bandeira and Pinhão; the tenth, the Barroca, was built into the city walls themselves.

The walls and ramparts were classified as national monuments by a decree published on 20 June 1924. From the second half of the 1950s the state carried out a wide intervention for the Henry the Navigator centenary, rebuilding the Castelo dos Governadores, stretches of wall and the buildings set against them, and laying out the Avenida dos Descobrimentos on ground reclaimed from the sea. Further conservation followed in the 1980s and, by the municipality, in the 2010s. In 2001 the Baluarte da Porta da Vila was reclassified as an astronomical observatory.

A considerable part of the circuit has been demolished, chiefly by the growth of the city. The surviving medieval stretch, the Pano Nascente, runs between the Castelo dos Governadores and the Torreão da Ribeira and takes in the Porta de São Gonçalo, flanked by two torres albarrãs; over its arch stood a church dedicated to Santa Bárbara, and in the gate itself is an oratory to São Gonçalo, who by tradition was born in 1360 in a house nearby, at what was then the Portas do Mar. The stretch along the modern Rua da Barroca stood on the banks of the Ribeira de Bensafrim until the 1960s, panels of wall near the Praça do Infante were taken up into the raised platform built for the Messe Militar, and the ground outside the walls on the landward side was laid out as the Anel Verde park. The Ordem dos Arquitectos has judged the walls the principal monument of Lagos's built heritage, for their history, as a unique example of a military structure of the period in which they were built, and for the shape they give the historic centre.