Castelo de Tomar

King Afonso Henriques joined the Knights Templar in 1128 and, thirty years later, donated land to the order on a hill above the river Nabão. After a year based at the ruined Castelo de Cera, the Templar Master in Portugal, Dom Gualdim Pais, chose the new site and began building on 1 March 1160 — a date recorded in an inscription on the keep, which states that the castle was raised in the reign of Afonso, most illustrious king of Portugal, and that the finished work was offered to God and the Knights of the Temple. Gualdim Pais granted the district its first charter in 1162, confirmed in 1174.

The Templars built Tomar with techniques learned over decades in Normandy and Brittany: a central keep — one of the oldest in Portugal — and round towers in the outer walls, more resistant to attack than square ones, with a battered stone base, the alambor, running the length of the walls to keep siege engines and miners away from their foot. The round church begun alongside the castle, the Charola, was modelled, like other Templar churches, on the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Most of the new town's residents lived inside the castle's protective outer walls.

The Order received the domains of Idanha and Monsanto in 1165 and was promised a third of any lands it conquered south of the Tagus in 1169; the following year the castle of Almourol was built to strengthen the same defensive line. Under King Sancho I, the Almohad counter-offensive of 1190, led by Caliph Yaqub al-Mansur, recaptured Silves and the Algarve, then swept north, taking Alcácer do Sal, Palmela and Almada before crossing the Tagus, besieging Santarém and destroying Torres Novas and Abrantes on its way to Tomar. The Templars held the castle for five days — six, by other counts — breaking the momentum of the invasion; the Moors forced the southern gate and broke into the outer enclosure, and the ferocity of the fighting there gave it a lasting name, the Porta do Sangue, the Gate of Blood. A commemorative plaque later dated the assault to 13 July 1190.

King Denis had a Cistercian monastery built beside the castle in 1319. After the Templars were suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312, Denis safeguarded the order's Portuguese holdings by founding the Order of Christ, initially seated at Castro Marim in the Algarve, to inherit them; its headquarters moved to Tomar around 1338, by some accounts as late as 1357. When Prince Henry the Navigator led the Order of Christ, he enlarged the round church with a Gothic nave and built himself a palace within the castle walls. In the 16th century, Manuel I and John III both ordered restoration and reinforcement work that enlarged the Convento de Cristo; Manuel's building programme forced the castle's remaining intramural residents to resettle in the town below in 1499.

The castle's north-west tower had already been demolished in 1618 to widen the entrance to its precinct. The site was damaged by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and again by Napoleon's Grande Armée during the Peninsular War, and after Portugal dissolved its monasteries in 1834, part of the convent served as a military hospital. The castle was declared a National Monument in 1910 and, with the rest of the Convento de Cristo, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983; further restoration followed on the wall-walk between the Porta do Sol and the Torre da Rainha in 1973, and on the walls near the Porta do Sangue in 1986.