Castle of Paderne

A Lusitanian castro founded in the late Neolithic or early Chalcolithic stood on the hill above a bend in the Quarteira River. Roman armies took it in the middle of the 2nd century BC and made the settlement a military outpost and then an administrative centre named Paderne or Paderna, commanding the Roman road that crossed the Quarteira by a bridge to the south-west. It fell to Muslim forces by 713.

The castle itself belongs to the Almohad period, dated to the 11th century or the middle of the 12th, and in other accounts to the later 12th century. It was built as a hisn, a rural fortification combining a place to live with a place to defend, one of a second line of inland works raised against the advancing Christian armies.

The oldest reference to it dates from 1189, when King Sancho I attacked the Algarve with the support of a crusader fleet and took Paderne, by a night assault in one account and by surrender after the fall of Silves in another. In 1191 Almohad forces under the Caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur recaptured the castle and the lands around it.

In 1248, during the reign of Afonso III, knights of the Order of Santiago under their master Paio Peres Correia took Paderne for the Portuguese crown. The forces of Peres Correia massacred all the Muslim inhabitants within the castle. Correia's own account described the place as "forte e muito bom da grande comarca em redor, entre Albufeira e a serra" — strong and very good, between Albufeira and the hills. The reconquest of the Algarve was finished the following year with Silves, Faro, Albufeira and Porches.

A Christian church was raised inside the walls in the 13th or 14th century, probably over an earlier Islamic religious building. King Denis gave the castle in 1305, after restoration works, to Lourenço Anes, master of the Order of Avis, an attempt to make it a viable military and economic centre that proved futile.

Between the 15th and 16th centuries strategic weight in the Algarve shifted to the coastal fortresses, and Paderne lost its military and religious standing. The village moved to a new site early in the 16th century, and in 1506 a new parish church dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Esperança was built there; the hermitage within the castle, Nossa Senhora da Assunção, also known as the Ermida da Senhora do Castelo, was left behind. The earthquake of 1755 brought down part of the albarrã tower and of the walls. The castle was officially closed in 1858 and worship in the hermitage suspended the same year, its tiles and timbers taken for the new parish church and for the Ermida de Nossa Senhora do Pé da Cruz.

The castle is considered a unique example in Portugal of an Almohad hisn, and one of the best works of military taipa in the Iberian Peninsula: rammed earth with a high proportion of lime, set on a stepped limestone plinth. The enclosure is irregular and roughly trapezoidal, without corner towers; the single tower is an albarrã standing about a metre outside the north-east wall, square in plan at some 5.85 metres a side and 9.3 metres high, reached from the rampart by a walkway carried on a stone arch. The only way in lies beside it, an elbow entrance turned to the south-east to make a frontal attack difficult. Within, the Islamic town was laid out on an orthogonal plan of narrow streets and courtyard houses, and two cisterns record the two occupations of the fortress, before and after the reconquest.

The monument was classified as an Imóvel de Interesse Público by decree of 22 November 1971, and a special protection zone was defined in 1999. Archaeological work in the 1980s identified the fortifications, the houses and the church.

On 10 March 1998 the fort and its dependencies were transferred to the Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico, which bought the monument and its lands for 29,000,000 escudos. A public tender issued on 29 January 2002 under PROAlgarve covered the recovery of the taipa walls, archaeological study and the consolidation of the hermitage ruins; the excavations unearthed dwellings, roadways and a sewage system. The castle lies in a Natura 2000 area, on a walking route of the Institute for the Conservation of Nature, and tradition counts it among the seven castles on the flag of Portugal. Responsibility passed to the Direcção Regional de Cultura do Algarve in 2009, and from 2018 its management has been shared with the municipality of Albufeira.