Alentejo
Discover Alentejo
Introduction
The Alentejo is a third of Portugal and about five per cent of its people: a vast, rolling, sun-bleached country south of the Tagus and north of the Algarve, given over to cork oak, olive and wheat. Portugal produces around half the world’s cork, most of it from here, and the montado — open oak savannah grazed beneath the trees — is a farmed landscape that has stayed more or less unchanged for centuries.
Évora, the regional capital, is a walled UNESCO city with a Roman temple standing in the middle of it, a university founded in 1559, and a chapel lined with the bones of five thousand monks. Elvas, on the Spanish border, is UNESCO-listed for the largest bulwarked fortifications in the world. Outside Évora the Almendres stone circle predates Stonehenge by around two thousand years, and the marble towns of Estremoz, Borba and Vila Viçosa quarry so much of it that the pavements are made of the stuff.
The Alqueva reservoir, the largest artificial lake in western Europe, doubles as a certified dark sky reserve. The Atlantic coast on the Vicentina is cold, windy and largely undeveloped, with some of the best surf in Europe. The wine is increasingly good, black Iberian pork and bread-based açorda are the cooking, and the male polyphonic singing called cante alentejano is UNESCO-listed. Summers are extremely hot; spring is the season.