Castle of Marvão

Marvão stands on the northern flank of the Serra de São Mamede, on a quartzite crest commanding the border line and, in the past, the crossing of the river Sever, a tributary of the Tagus. Little is known of the earliest occupation of the site, possibly a prehistoric castro. Some authors hold it to be the Romanised settlement the Lusitanians called Medóbriga, contested between the forces of Pompey and Julius Caesar and taken by Caesar's troops under the propraetor Caius Longinus. What drew Rome to the place was the road running from Norba Caesarina, now Cáceres, to Scallabis, now Santarém, and the bridge that carried it over the Sever at the Ponte da Portagem.

Little more is recorded of the Suebic, Visigothic and Muslim invasions that followed, but between 876 and 877 Ibn Marwan installed himself here, and by the tenth century the place was known as Amaia de Ibn Marwan, or the fortress of Amaia. The building of a castle at Marvão has been attributed to him.

A local tradition accounts for the castle's patroness. In the eighth century, unable to hold against the Moorish advance in the region, the people of Marvão are said to have abandoned their lands for the mountains of the Asturias, where Christian resistance held out, hiding their sacred images before they went. More than four centuries later, at the time of the Reconquest, a shepherd guided by a star is said to have found an image of Our Lady among the rocks of a hill; a Franciscan house, the Convento de Nossa Senhora da Estrela, was raised on the spot, and the Lady became protector of the castle. The same devotion carries a second story: that one night, as Castilian troops led by two traitors crept up on the castle to storm it, a woman's voice was heard in the dark crying "Às armas!", and while the sentries were rousing the garrison the Castilians could be seen fleeing back down the slope.

In the course of the conquest of Alcácer do Sal, Afonso Henriques is said to have taken the town from the Moors at some point between 1160 and 1166, although the castle fell briefly into Almohad hands again in the 1190s. By the demarcation of the term of Castelo Branco in 1214, Marvão was already reckoned Portuguese ground. D. Sancho II granted it a foral in 1226, intended to keep this forward sentinel settled and defended against the repeated incursions then coming out of Castile.

D. Afonso III gave the lordship of Marvão to the knights of the Order of Malta in 1271, and it passed afterwards to his son Afonso Sanches, together with the lordships of Arronches, Castelo de Vide and Portalegre. For that reason, at the opening of D. Dinis's reign the town and its castle were caught in the quarrel between the king and the infante, and were taken by the king's forces in 1299. When the matter was closed, the lands of Marvão, Portalegre and Arronches were exchanged for those of Sintra and Ourém and remained in the sovereign's possession. Dinis confirmed the foral of 1226 and set about enlarging and strengthening the defences, above all the keep tower, begun in 1300.

In the reign of D. Fernando a couto de homiziados, a place of sanctuary, was established at Marvão in 1378. His death brought on the succession crisis of 1383–1385, in which the town and its castle declared for the party of the Master of Avis. The new sovereign and his successors granted the village a run of privileges, in 1407, 1436 and 1497, all aimed at increasing its settlement and its defence, and the walls were reinforced in the same phase; the turrets, or cubelos, date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

With the Restoration of Portuguese independence and the war that followed, Marvão's defences were remodelled to meet the artillery of the day. The first phase of that work ran between 1640 and 1662, when the abbot D. João Dama rebuilt a stretch of wall and the barbicans, which stood in ruins, saw to the castle gates and made the other repairs the town's defence required. The works were still in hand when Spanish forces assaulted the place in 1641 and again in 1648, and it traded blows actively with the neighbouring stronghold of Valencia de Alcántara until that town was taken by the forces of D. António Luís de Meneses in 1644. A report by Nicolau de Langres from these years records that the Portuguese infantry and cavalry garrisoning the fortification had come from Castelo de Vide, a concentration that made Marvão the primary line of defence.

Repairs to the walls followed in 1662 under the direction of Luís Serrão Pimentel, to make good the damage of the Restoration fighting. The adaptation of the defences at the end of the seventeenth century turned the castle into the citadel of a bastioned fortress, with gun embrasures on the terraces that allowed grazing fire, and construction and remodelling went on through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reinforcing the bastions. Against a siege the garrison had a large rain-collecting cistern, rectangular and roofed by a vault carried on ten stone ribs, fed from a reservoir above the vault.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the fortress was taken by the Spanish army in 1704, and retaken the following year by Portuguese troops under the command of the Count of São João. A fresh Spanish assault on the town came decades later, in 1772. During the Peninsular War it was occupied by French troops, Jean-Andoche Junot's corps acting with the support of their Spanish allies, and the military square was liberated in 1808. In the Liberal Wars it was occupied by Liberal forces on 12 December 1833, and besieged the following year by Miguelite troops.

The castle was classified a National Monument by decree published on 4 July 1922. Public intervention began in 1938 under the Direcção-Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais, which set about the walls, staircases and battlements, and campaigns of repair, reconstruction, cleaning and painting have followed at intervals ever since. In October 1960 the castle was brought within a Special Protection Zone and a non aedificandi zone, revoked two years later. The southern barbican, destroyed in 1997, was rebuilt between 1998 and 1999, and a general plan covering nine parts of the structure was begun in 2002.

Since 2013 the Centro Cultural de Marvão has held the concession to manage and operate the castle. It is kept in good repair with the support of the Liga dos Amigos do Castelo de Marvão and the municipal council, and visitors are offered guided tours of the archaeological armoury collection housed within it.