Monuments

Silves Castle and Urban Enclosure (Castelo e Cerca Urbana de Silves)

A tour of Silves is not complete without a visit to its castle, considered one of the main and most beautiful Muslim fortifications in Portugal and the largest in the Algarve.

Classified as a national monument in 1910, the history of the castle dates back to the period when Silves was transformed into a strong occupation base and commercial centre of great prosperity under Roman rule.

Around 716, the Moorish conquest brought gigantic changes to the fortress that the Romans had built above the city. Situated on the highest point of the hill on which the city stands, the fortress was reinforced with a new walled enclosure with towers and armour, which extended along the right bank of the stream.

Heavily damaged by the 1755 earthquake and absorbed by the growth of the city, this solid defensive system of military mudstone - made of a mixture of clay, gravel, sand and lime and with red sandstone of the region (sandstone of Silves) which gives it its reddish hue - two large areas remain, the Citadel and the Medina.

The Citadel, built at the top of the hill and protected by 11 square towers (four of which have undergone 14th and 15th century alterations, including vaulted rooms and Gothic arched doors), houses two cisterns, the Moorish (Moura) and the Dogs (Cães).

There are two legends about these two wells. As for the Moorish Cistern (Cisterna da Moura), which supplied water to the population of Silves until the 1990s, the legend says that on the nights of St. John a Moorish princess laments her death, wandering around in a silver boat with golden oars, waiting for a prince to pronounce the magic words for her disenchantment. In the Cistern of the Dogs (Cisterna dos Cães), treasure hunters are said to have launched the dogs to fetch the great treasures left behind by the Muslims in the castle's underground vaults, but the dogs never returned.

In turn, the Medina was linked to the citadel by a gate protected by two towers.

At the Castle entrance, there is a statue in honour of the Portuguese king Sancho I who, in 1189, conquered Silves for the first time from the Muslims, although the town was only definitively conquered by the Christians in 1242.