Almeida Fortress

Seen from the air, Almeida is a stone star pressed into the high plateau of the Beira, a dozen sharp points of wall and ravelin wrapped around a small town. It sits about seven kilometres from the Spanish border, just east of the valley of the Côa, guarding an old cross-border road, and for three centuries that position made it one of the most fought-over places in the country. A castle stood here from the Middle Ages, but the fortress you walk today belongs to a later age: work on a modern bastioned ring began in 1641, when Portugal had just broken away from Spanish rule and needed to hold its frontier, and it was only brought to completion in the late eighteenth century under the Count of Lippe, the German soldier who reorganised the Portuguese army.

The plan is an irregular star of six bastions separated by six curtain walls, each curtain screened by a detached ravelin, so that the outline has twelve points in all. The perimeter runs to about 2.5 km, the walls are faced with dressed granite, and the dry ditch in front of them is around twelve metres deep. Two double gates lead in, each approached across a masonry bridge and running as a vaulted, bomb-proof tunnel through the rampart under the royal arms: the Portas de São Francisco and the Portas de Santo António. There are also hidden sally ports that drop into underground galleries, and a range of bomb-proof casemates, divided into about twenty rooms and passages, where the garrison and its stores could shelter under bombardment. The best way to understand the design is to walk the ditches and the covered way, where every angle is set so that one bastion can fire along the face of the next.

Almeida's history is written into its fabric. It was taken by Spanish forces in 1762 during the Seven Years' War, handed to Junot's French army in 1807, and besieged again by Masséna in August 1810. During that siege a shell set off the main powder magazine: the blast destroyed the old medieval castle and much of the town, killed and wounded more than five hundred people and forced the surrender. Within months the British besieged the French in turn, and the retreating garrison blew up parts of the works behind them. Of the medieval castle only the foundations remain, still visible inside the walls. During the Portuguese civil war of the 1830s the casemates held some 1,500 political prisoners. The army finally left in 1927, and the fortress was classified as a national monument in 1928.

Inside the ring the town is quiet and handsome: the long infantry barracks built under the Count of Lippe, carrying the royal coat of arms, the clock tower, the royal riding school housed in the old artillery train building, and the casemates, which since 2009 hold a military history museum in seven rooms. Every August the town stages a re-enactment of the 1810 siege. Almeida is one of Portugal's designated Historic Villages and belongs to a group of bastioned frontier fortresses, with Elvas, Marvão and Valença, put forward to UNESCO in 2024.

Getting there

Almeida lies in the Guarda district of central Portugal, close to the Spanish border; the nearest sizeable town is Guarda, about 35 minutes away by car. The closest airport by distance is the small regional airport of Vila Real (VRL), about 92 km away, but most visitors come by road from Porto (OPO), roughly two and a half hours' drive. Almeida has no railway station of its own; the nearest is Vilar Formoso on the Portugal–Spain line, about 20 km away, from where a taxi or local bus covers the rest. Guarda also has buses to Almeida via Vilar Formoso.