Mértola

Overview

Mértola is a small town on a hill above the Guadiana in the far south-east of the Alentejo, the last navigable point of the river and a port since the Phoenicians, which kept the only medieval mosque in Portugal to survive as a building: the parish church, with its horseshoe-arched doors, its forest of columns and the mihrab still in the wall behind the altar. Around it a castle with a 30 m keep, Roman walls and a museum scattered through the town in the places where the digs happened; the town began the process for World Heritage listing in 2017.

It is a long way from anywhere, 2,500 people in a municipality with the second-lowest density in the country, and the visit is quiet: the church, the keep, the museum rooms, the river.

History

Myrtilis was a Conii settlement that Rome made a municipium under Augustus, shipping silver, gold, tin and grain down the Guadiana to the Mediterranean and minting its own coin; Greek tombstones of the 6th and 7th centuries show Byzantine merchants still trading here after the Sueves and Visigoths. Under the Moors it was a port between the Alentejo and North Africa, an independent taifa after 1031 and again from 1144 to 1150 under the mystic Ibn Qasi, who unified the south against the Almoravids before the Almohads swept him away; the mosque is 12th-century.

Sancho II took the town in 1238 and gave it to the Order of St James, whose seat it was until 1316 and who rebuilt the castle and finished the keep around 1292; the charter dates from 1254. Trade faded, revived briefly when the town shipped grain to the Portuguese garrisons in Morocco in the 15th and 16th centuries, and returned with the copper mine of São Domingos from about 1850 until it was exhausted in 1965, after which the people emigrated; the excavations that began in the 1980s made the town what it is now.

Visiting

The Igreja Matriz is the reason to come: a mosque of the 12th and 13th centuries turned into a church after 1238 with its structure intact, four aisles on columns under Manueline vaulting added in the 16th century with a Renaissance portal, the mihrab niche still pointing to Mecca behind the altar, and four horseshoe-arched doors outside. Above it the castle, rebuilt by the knights of Santiago, with the keep of 1292 whose hall has Gothic vaulting and whose roof has the view down the river; the town wall still runs round the hill.

The museum is in pieces across the town: the Islamic collection, the most important in Portugal, with its pottery, glass, metalwork and coins, in the old cellars of the House of Braganza; the palaeochristian basilica with its inscribed tombstones of the 5th to 8th centuries; and the Roman house excavated under the town hall.

Tips

• The Islamic Festival, every two years in May, is the one time the town is full; otherwise it is empty and the restaurants close early.
• Summers are among the hottest in Portugal; spring and autumn are the seasons, and the river walk is for the evening.
• The São Domingos mine, 17 km east, is a ghost village of English company houses and red water, and the strangest place in the Alentejo.
• Buses from Beja are few; a car is the practical way.

Nearby

• Mina de São Domingos: 17 km east.
• Guadiana Valley Natural Park: the river gorge south of the town.
• Serpa: 45 km north.
• Alcoutim and the Algarve border: 40 km south along the river.