Anta de Pavia

In the middle of the village square of Pavia, surrounded by paving and parked cars, stands one of the largest megalithic tombs of the Iberian Peninsula, wearing the disguise of a village chapel. The Anta de Pavia was raised in the fourth or third millennium BC as a passage grave: a polygonal burial chamber built from seven massive upright slabs and roofed by a single capstone measuring about three metres by two and a half. The chamber reaches roughly 4.3 metres across at its widest and 3.3 metres high, a scale that still feels imposing when you stand inside it.

Some four thousand years after it was built, in the seventeenth century, the villagers turned the tomb into a chapel dedicated to São Dinis. The Neolithic chamber became the apse, and in front of it they added a tiny nave barely a metre long, a triangular gabled façade, three steps up to the door, a small belfry and a cross, and decorated it with azulejo tiles. The earliest written record of the chapel dates from 1625. The result is a building in which the grey granite of the uprights is still plainly visible behind a Baroque village front, which is the pleasure of looking at it: two entirely different ideas of a sacred place fused into one small structure.

The dolmen once had an entrance corridor leading to the chamber, as passage graves in this part of the Alentejo usually did. It had disappeared from view long ago, but the archaeologist Vergílio Correia excavated here in 1914, and fresh work in 2014 confirmed that remains of the passage survive below ground. Portugal classified the Anta de Pavia as a National Monument in 1910, and it is generally regarded as the finest example of the country's anta-capelas, the dolmens reused as Christian chapels.

The countryside around Mora is scattered with other megaliths, and the village is a quiet place of low white houses. The contrast between the everyday square and the prehistoric stones at its centre is what makes the visit memorable.

Getting there

The Anta de Pavia stands in the main square of Pavia, a village in the municipality of Mora, about 38 km from Évora. The nearest international airport is Lisbon Humberto Delgado (LIS), about 98 km away.