Castle of Tavira

Tavira's defences begin a long way below the medieval walls. An archaeological campaign in 1997 brought to light a stretch of Phoenician walling dated to the eighth century BC, evidence of a trading post or colony planted at the mouth of the Gilão by that people of sailors and merchants. When Rome took the Iberian Peninsula the settlement, then called Balsa, acquired strategic weight from the bridge carried over the river; no material trace of a fortification of that period has been found here, though a detachment is believed to have garrisoned this stretch of the old Roman road.

Archaeological work places the Muslim settlement in the eleventh century, but the first written notices of it belong to the first half of the twelfth, when it was called at-Tabira and its fortification was named in the fighting between Almoravids and Almohads. The oldest surviving walling belongs to the Almoravid period of the late eleventh or early twelfth century, and is thought to have consisted of an alcáçova in the south-eastern angle and a walled enclosure running north to south, both of modest size. The Almohad rebuilding gave the castle the main elements that have lasted, among them stretches of rammed earth and the multifaceted albarrã tower that still stands detached and facing south.

In 1168 the town was brought under the emir Almunine, and Ibn Sahib al-Sala's Al-Mann bil-Imama records how. The Almohads pressed the siege of the castle of Tavira against the rebel who had risen inside it, Abdallah ibn Ubayd Allah, closing on him hard by land and sea, quartering their large army in the castle of Cacela and attacking day and night. The chronicler charges the town with sheltering adventurers and thieves who had preyed on Muslims by land and sea since 1151, and whose plundering of travellers and merchants worried people on the far side of the Strait and in al-Andalus alike. He also records that the emir had already besieged the place twice during his emirate at Seville before it fell at the close of Dhu al-Qa'da, in the first days of September 1168. Tavira then ranked with Santa Maria al-Harum, now Faro, and Silb, now Silves, among the chief settlements of the Gharb al-Andalus.

Portuguese forces reached the eastern Algarve from 1238. Tavira was taken on 11 June 1239 by troops under D. Paio Peres Correia, Master of the Order of Santiago, though the year is disputed: Alexandre Herculano put the conquest in May 1240, and other accounts as late as 1242. Tradition makes the assault a reprisal by the Order for the deaths of seven of its knights, ambushed while hunting at the site of Antas, in what is now the parish of Luz, during a truce then holding between Christians and Moors. Local legend keeps the losing side too, in Aben-Fabila, the Moorish governor said to have vanished by magic arts as the Christians came, leaving his daughter enchanted behind him; he meant to come back and retake the city to free her, and never did.

On 9 January 1242, or 1244 by other accounts, Sancho II of Portugal (1223–1248) granted the domains of Tavira and the patronage of its church to the Order of Santiago, a donation Pope Innocent IV confirmed in 1245. Alfonso X of Castile, on the pretext that the town had been won by a Castilian military order, claimed it for himself, laid siege to it and took it in 1252. A treaty the following year settled that Afonso III of Portugal (1248–1279) would marry Alfonso X's daughter, and that if a son of the marriage reached the age of seven his maternal grandfather would make him a gift of the Algarve. The conditions were met in 1264, and Alfonso X delivered the Algarve to Afonso III by letter given at Seville on 20 September. In consequence of that act the Portuguese king granted charters to the Algarve towns, Tavira the first of them, in August 1266.

Under Dinis (1279–1325) the castle was repaired and reinforced and the town's circuit enlarged in 1292, a date carried by an epigraphic inscription, and the keep belongs to the same campaign. From the Christian conquest onward the enclosure took the oval plan still identifiable today, reaching about five hectares by the late Middle Ages, a considerable surface for the time and a measure of what the settlement was worth. The interventions of Afonso III and Dinis stand out among the medieval phases, and the broken arch of what became the D. Manuel Gate, still Gothic in style, is believed to date from the second of those reigns. By royal letter of 15 April 1303 Dinis widened the residents' privileges, forbidding the seizure or sale of their goods except for debts owed to the Crown.

Tradition attaches one more siege to these walls. In the reign of Afonso IV (1325–1357), about 1328, Alfonso XI of Castile is said to have camped at the church of São Francisco and, choosing his point of attack one Saturday at dawn, to have seen above the church of Santa Maria seven huge figures holding banners charged with the arms of the apostle Santiago. Told by his councillors that these were the seven knights killed at the conquest of Tavira and now the city's guardians, he turned back to his own kingdom without doing any harm in Portugal, at least as Frei João de São José tells it.

In the succession crisis of 1383–1385 the Master of Avis, the future John I (1385–1433), gave the Reguengo de Tavira to Fernão Álvares Pereira, brother of the Constable Nuno Álvares Pereira. After the conquest of Ceuta and the opening of the Portuguese discoveries the town's strategic and economic importance rose, but its castle did not keep pace: its people complained before the Cortes of 1475 that the place was at risk of collapse.

Under Manuel I (1495–1521) Tavira received its Foral Novo in 1504 and was raised to the rank of city on 16 March 1520, with other substantial privileges attached; Vasco Eanes Corte-Real held the office of alcaide-mor at the time. The D. Manuel Gate had by then become the main axis of passage between the inside and the outside of the walls, which is why that king's arms are cut into it. When King Sebastian came to Tavira in 1573 the building of the Forte de Santo António, the Forte do Rato, facing the bar of the Gilão, was already in progress.

During the Restoration war John IV (1640–1656) confirmed every privilege Tavira had been granted by his predecessors and ordered works to modernise the medieval castle, reinforcing its structure and adapting it to the shot of the artillery then modern. The town's defence was complemented in 1672 by the start of building on the fortress of São João da Barra de Tavira, at Gomeira, facing the bar of the Gilão.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 severely damaged the castle's structure, and that damage certainly contributed to the dismantling of much of the settlement's defensive perimeter over the centuries that followed. The medieval enclosure survives in the parish union of Tavira (Santa Maria e Santiago). The walls of the Castle of Tavira were classified as a National Monument by decree published on 16 May 1939, and the castle itself has carried that designation since 2014.