Fort of Nossa Senhora da Graça, Elvas

Interesting facts

Building the fort took nearly 30 years, about six thousand workers, four thousand animals and some 120,000 gold coins.

In 1808 a Spanish general who refused to accept the Convention of Sintra shelled the fort from afar, knocking only cornices and chimneys off the governor's house.

Its French garrison of about 1,200 men held out against the Spanish until late November 1808, marching out only after British troops arrived.

A 19th-century visitor wrote that its reservoir could supply a garrison of 2,000 men for two years, with a mill and bakery inside the walls.

The same visitor recorded a very deep well whose water mixed with oil into a milky, unpleasant-tasting liquid, which he called a curiosity of natural history.

Though widely judged impregnable, it was criticised by the French general Dumouriez, who thought its rock-cut batteries vulnerable and its hornwork too far out.

Its monumental main entrance is known as the Dragon Gate, set into one of the four ravelins, with three smaller posterns in the others.

The central redoubt was pierced with casemated gun ports for three tiers of artillery, crowned by the round tower housing the chapel and governor's quarters.

The fort was declared a Portuguese National Monument in 1910, more than a century before its UNESCO listing.

Count Lippe, whose name the fort bears, commanded the Portuguese army from 1762 to 1764 after being called in by the Marquis of Pombal.

Why it is worth it

On the summit of Monte da Graça, a bare hill about a kilometre north of Elvas, sits one of the most complete and elegant eighteenth-century fortresses in Europe. The hill had already proved its danger: in 1658, during the Portuguese Restoration War, Spanish troops besieging Elvas occupied it and could look straight down into the town. A century later Portugal decided that nobody should do so again. Construction began in 1763 under King Joseph I, directed by Wilhelm, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, the German marshal brought in to reform the Portuguese army, and the fort was finished in 1792 and named after him, Forte de Lippe.

Lippe took as a model his own island fortress of Wilhelmstein in Lower Saxony. The plan is a square of roughly 150 metres with pentagonal bastions at the corners, four ravelins shielding the curtain walls, a hornwork and a deep dry moat, all wrapped in a star-shaped outer earthwork. The design was drawn by the French engineer Étienne and completed under Guillaume de Valleré. Layer after layer of walls closes in towards the centre, where a round, two-storey redoubt holds the heart of the fort: a decorated chapel on the ground floor, a cistern carved into the rock below, and the governor's house above, from which the commander could see the whole fortification spread around him.

The fort held during the War of the Oranges in 1801 and again in the Peninsular War in 1811, but it was later reduced to a military prison and slowly fell into near ruin. A restoration completed in 2015 brought it back into use as a place to visit. Since 2012 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Garrison Border Town of Elvas and its Fortifications, together with the bastioned walls of the town itself, and from its dominant hilltop the fort still looks down on the whole defensive system it was built to protect.

Getting there

The fort stands about 1 km north of Elvas in the Alentejo. The Spanish city of Badajoz lies about 17 km away across the border, and Portalegre, the district capital, about 50 km to the north. The nearest airport is Badajoz (BJZ), roughly 30 km away.

Fort of Nossa Senhora da Graça, Elvas

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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