Castle of Silves

Excavations point to an early Lusitanian hillfort on the hill above the Arade river, a site Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians are said to have passed through before Rome conquered it around 201 BC and built it into a citadel and trading centre that prospered for roughly five centuries. Around 716 the Visigothic citadel fell to the Umayyad Caliphate, whose forces reinforced it with new walls and began the long building programme, including the extensive walls on the western side, that continued under later Arab rule.

Silves became the capital of a taifa, a kind of autonomous kingdom, in the 11th century. Within the citadel, a governor's palace occupied by Al-Mutamid became known as the Palace of the Balconies, the name under which it appears in a poem he wrote about the city. The castle's walls and towers that stand today were raised during Almoravid and Almohad campaigns and public works of the 12th and 13th centuries.

A Christian force sacked the city in 1160 and held it only a short time before the Moors recaptured it. In 1189 King Sancho I of Portugal, backed by a Crusader army, took Silves after a prolonged siege. About a year and a half later, in 1191, a large Muslim army under the orders of the Amir al-Mu'minin retook it, and the destruction those campaigns left behind prevented the city's revival. Portuguese forces under Paio Peres Correia, in the reign of King Afonso III, took the fortress for good in 1249.

A municipal charter was issued for Silves in 1266 by Afonso III; King Dinis supported it with residential concessions in 1305, repeated in 1380 under Fernando I. Prince Henry the Navigator was named alcalde of Silves in 1457, and King John II granted further concessions in 1487, but little development followed. On 1 November 1755 the Lisbon earthquake damaged the castle, causing what Moreira de Mendonça recorded in 1758 as the loss of its cathedral, tower, castle and walls; at some point later in the century the dungeons were rebuilt and their ceilings repainted. During the Liberal Wars, local people repaired the walls under a man known as Remexido, working without regard for the original foundations.

The Directorate-General of Buildings and National Monuments carried out its first restoration campaign in the 1940s, demolishing structures built against the walls, rebuilding a ruined tower, re-tiling the guardhouse, consolidating the keep and reconstructing the battlements; further repairs followed through the 1960s to 1980s, including fitting a municipal museum into the towers from 1967. Excavations begun in August 2005 by archaeologists Rosa and Mário Varela Gomes uncovered an 11th-century governor's palace, decorated with polychrome stucco, that had been occupied by Al-Mutamid, along with traces of another building near the south-west wall thought to be where Prince Henry had lived during his time as alcalde.