Alentejo historical timeline

The Alentejo has one of the longest continuous records of settlement in Europe.

Megaliths

Between roughly 6000 and 3000 BC, people here raised standing stones, stone circles and chambered tombs in greater numbers than almost anywhere in Europe. The Almendres cromlech may be the oldest stone circle known, predating Stonehenge by around two thousand years, and dolmens stand in fields across the region.

Rome

Evora became Liberalitas Julia under Augustus, with a forum, walls and an aqueduct, and the plains were farmed for wheat and olive oil shipped to Rome. Marble from Estremoz and Vila Vicosa was quarried then and still is.

Al-Andalus

Muslim rule from 715 for around five centuries brought irrigation, new crops and the whitewashed, low-built architecture that still defines the villages. Mertola preserves a mosque converted into a church with its mihrab intact.

Reconquest and frontier

Christian conquest in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after which the region became a militarised frontier with Castile — hence the extraordinary density of fortified hill towns, and the star fortifications at Elvas built after independence was reasserted in 1640.

Mining

The copper and pyrite belt in the south has been worked since antiquity, and at Mina de Sao Domingos a British company ran an open-pit operation from the 1850s with company housing, a private railway to the Guadiana and appalling conditions. It closed in 1966, leaving a company town, a red acid lake and a mining tradition that fed the region’s labour politics.

Land and revolution

Great estates and landless labourers into the twentieth century, then the 1974 revolution and a wave of farm occupations and agrarian reform, largely reversed in the following decade.