Castle of Almourol

The granite islet that carries the castle rises 18 metres out of the Tagus a little below its confluence with the Zêzere, opposite the town of Tancos. Excavations in the two enclosures have turned up Roman coins and foundations, and medieval medallions and two marble columns were found in the castle's vicinity; the fortress is believed to stand on the site of a primitive Lusitanian hillfort taken by the Romans in the 1st century BC. Alans, Visigoths and, from the 8th century, Muslim forces who called it Al-morolan ("high stone") held the rock afterwards, though it is unclear when the present castle was established. In 1129 Afonso Henriques's forces took Al-morolan, and it was placed in the trust of Gualdim Pais, master of the Knights Templar in Portugal.

Pais rebuilt the castle, work that an inscription over the main gate dates to 1171. A second inscription, over the interior gate, carries the same date; a third, over the sacristy door of the church of the Convent of Tomar, adds two further castles, Idanha and Monsanto, to the list of his works, which shows that stone to be later than the first, since those two were built after 1171. The main gate inscription names Pais as a native of Braga, records his military action against the Muslims in Egypt and Syria, and credits him with the castles of Pombal, Tomar, Zêzere, Cardiga and Almourol. The three-storey keep here was an innovation the Templars had already raised at Tomar, their principal redoubt in Portugal, and watchtowers were another design the order brought into western Iberia; nine tall round towers reinforce the walls of the lower enclosure. As the seat of a commandery, Almourol became a key point on the Tagus, controlling the trade in olive oil, wheat, pork, fruit and timber between the regions of the territory and Lisbon; a charter granted to its inhabitants in 1170 suggests a settlement already living on one or both riverbanks.

As the Reconquista advanced south and Pope Clement V suppressed the Order of the Temple in 1311, during the reign of King Dinis, Almourol passed to the Order of Christ, the Templars' Portuguese successor. Losing its strategic place, the castle was abandoned and fell into ruin, and the earthquake of 1755 damaged it further.

Nineteenth-century Romanticism brought a second kind of change: following the taste of the day for seeing the works of the past in an ideal poetic light, the ruin was "reinvented" and given decorative alterations, among them the uniform crowning of the walls with crenellations and merlons. In the second half of that century the castle was handed to the Portuguese Army, under the commander of its Practical School of Engineering at Tancos. The Directorate-General of Buildings and National Monuments first intervened in 1939, building the wall-walk in masonry and reinforced concrete and dismantling and reconstructing a corner of the keep. Around 1940–1950 its spaces were fitted out as an official residence of the Portuguese Republic, and important official events were held here under the Estado Novo; concrete consolidation of the keep and repairs to the walls and road access continued through the 1950s and into 1960. Two new piers for tourist boats opened in June 2006, and a project begun in September 2013, worth roughly €500,000 and planned to run six months, set out to renovate the walls and fit the keep with an exhibition on the Templars.