Castle of Monsanto

Interesting facts

In 1165 King Afonso Henriques granted Monsanto and the surrounding lands to Gualdim Pais, Master of the Knights Templar in Portugal.

Only a few years later, in 1172, the castle was handed from the Templars to the Order of Santiago amid a legal dispute between the orders.

According to legend, the hilltop was first taken by the Roman praetor Lucius Aemilius Paullus, who captured an older hillfort settlement here.

In the early 16th century Duarte de Armas drew the castle for his Book of Fortresses, showing two gates, four towers, a keep and a cistern.

Royal surveys counted 309 inhabitants in 1496 and 494 by 1527, a glimpse of how small the fortified village was in its heyday.

In 1704 Franco-Spanish troops under the Duke of Berwick besieged and took Monsanto before Portuguese forces under the Marquis of Minas recovered it.

After the Spanish invasion of 1762, its walls were rebuilt on the orders of the Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, the German marshal who reorganised Portugal's defences.

A cliff collapse in 1831 carried away one of the outer walls, adding nature's damage to that of the earlier gunpowder blast.

From the 763-metre summit the view reaches the Serra da Estrela, mainland Portugal's highest range, and the castles of Penamacor and Belmonte.

Why it is worth it

In 1938 Portugal's Estado Novo regime ran a competition to find the country's "most Portuguese village," partly as an exercise in romanticising rural life for state propaganda. Monsanto won. There was never a second edition of the contest, so the title has simply stuck to this one hilltop village for nearly ninety years — along with building restrictions that came with the honour and are a large part of why the place still looks the way it did when it won.

The village is built directly into and around granite boulders far too massive to clear, which meant early builders used the rock itself as walls, roofs and floors rather than fighting it — a wedged-in, half-underground way of building that reads today as strikingly modern, even though it comes from necessity rather than taste.

The 12th-century hilltop fortress above the village endured repeated sieges, including — according to local legend — one long enough that defenders down to their last cow and last sack of grain fed the animal the grain, threw it over the wall, and convinced the besiegers there was still plenty of food left; the town still commemorates this every 3 May by throwing clay pots from the castle walls. What finally wrecked the castle wasn't an enemy at all: in 1815, lightning struck the gunpowder store inside, and the resulting explosion tore apart both the fortress and part of the surrounding parish — an accident, not a battle, that left the ruins standing today.

Getting there

40 km from Castelo Branco. Aerodromo Goncalves Lobato (Viseu Airport) (VSE) is about 101 km away.

Castle of Monsanto

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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