Castle of Castelo Rodrigo

Local tradition traced the first settlement on the hill to the Turduli around 500 BC and to a Roman oppidum after them, but recent archaeology bears out neither. From the Muslim period a cistern survives with a horseshoe-arched doorway, on what is now the Rua da Cadeia.

The village was taken during the Christian reconquest by Afonso IX of León (1188-1230), who raised the first castle here as part of a defensive line he laid across the Ribacôa alongside Alfaiates, Almeida, Castelo Bom and Castelo Melhor. That work was complete or well advanced by 1209, when the Concelho Perfeito de Castelo Rodrigo was created and the settlement received its first foral. Village and castle alike take their name from Count Rodrigo Gonçalves Girão, lord of the domains and the man charged with repopulating and defending the region. Set on schist crags at 810 metres above sea level, over the ribeira de Aguiar, the site stood on the medieval road from Guarda to Barca d'Alva, which carried pilgrims out of the Beira Baixa towards Santiago de Compostela.

King Dinis (1279-1325) disputed the Ribacôa with León at the end of the thirteenth century. The town had been taken by 1296, and in that year he confirmed to it the charters granted by Afonso IX; Portuguese possession was settled by the Treaty of Alcanices, agreed on 12 September 1297 with Fernando IV of Castile. Dinis then consolidated the new frontier, rebuilding a string of border castles from Alfaiates and Almeida to Sabugal and Vilar Maior along with Castelo Rodrigo.

To Dinis are credited the keep, the moats, the cistern and the barbican, and the walls that ring the village or at least extensive rebuilding of them. Two building phases stay legible: the Leonese work of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, whose circular towers set it apart from the square-towered Portuguese castles of its generation, and Dinis's reform of the first half of the fourteenth.

King Fernando granted the town a fair charter on 23 May 1373 and is thought to have improved its defences as well. In the succession crisis of 1383-1385 the alcaide declared for Beatriz and her husband, John I of Castile, and those defences are said to have dissuaded the forces of the Master of Avis from attacking. The punishment, once the Master was king, was heraldic and administrative: the national shield reversed on the town's arms, set on the front of the keep, and subordination to Pinhel. He moved the date of the town fair in 1386, which is reckoned to have cost the inhabitants dearly; they petitioned the king and obtained a further change of date, but that was not enough to halt the decline that had set in.

Manuel I issued a new charter on 25 June 1508 and sent Mateus Fernandes and Álvaro Pires to report on the state of the defences. Duarte de Armas drew the castle about 1509 for his Livro das Fortalezas, with an albarrã tower that has since disappeared, the northernmost of its type in Portugal.

Under the Habsburg kings Philip II raised the town to a county in 1594 for his counsellor Cristóvão de Moura, son of a former alcaide and a central figure in Spanish diplomacy during the succession crisis of 1580. From 1590 Moura had a residence built on the site of the old alcáçova; in 1600 Philip's successor raised the county to a marquisate, its holder styled first Marquis of Castelo Rodrigo. At the Restoration of Portuguese independence the townspeople burned the palace as a symbol of Spanish oppression, and it stands in ruins today.

In the first years of the Restoration the castle was looked after by Álvaro de Abrantes, Governor of Arms of the province of Beira. During the Restoration War a garrison of 150 men held it against a Spanish force of 3,000 under the Duke of Osuna, who were beaten by Pedro Jacques de Magalhães at the battle of Salgadela on 7 July 1664; local tradition has it that the duke and Don John of Austria escaped only by disguising themselves as friars. In the Seven Years' War, Spanish troops under the Marquis of Soria occupied the castle in 1762.

Its military use gone and the local economy in decline, Castelo Rodrigo lost the seat of the municipality to neighbouring Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo by royal charter of Maria II on 25 June 1836. The walls were classified a National Monument by decree published on 4 July 1922, partially restored in the 1940s, and taken in hand more recently under a comprehensive public conservation programme. They still enclose the village, which is one of Portugal's Aldeias Históricas.