Alentejo

The Alentejo is thick with prehistory. Hundreds of dolmens and standing stones survive around Évora, including the Almendres Cromlech, raised over several thousand years from the Neolithic. Rome made the region a granary, founding Pax Julia at Beja and building the temple that still stands in Évora, then known as Ebora. Under Moorish rule from the 8th century, the south became part of the Gharb al-Andalus; Mértola on the Guadiana was a river port, and its main church was built as a mosque.

The reconquest in the 12th and 13th centuries handed the land to the crown, the military orders and the nobility, and the pattern of latifúndios, huge estates worked by landless labourers, was set for seven centuries. Évora became a royal residence in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the university was founded under the Jesuits, and the Dukes of Braganza built their palace at Vila Viçosa; when they took the throne in 1640, the Alentejo supplied a royal house. Elvas and Marvão were fortified as bulwarks against Spain.

The 20th century brought hunger and conflict. In 1954 the farmworker Catarina Eufémia was shot dead by the Republican National Guard during a strike at Baleizão, near Beja, and became a symbol of resistance. After the 1974 revolution labourers occupied the estates and formed collective farms. The Alqueva dam, completed in 2002, has since transformed farming with irrigation.

The Alentejo is known within Portugal for its slowness, its dry humour and a landscape that shapes its people: long distances, heat and silence. Alentejanos are the butt of affectionate jokes about their unhurried pace, which they turn back on the rest of the country with equal wit. The region's great art form is cante alentejano, unaccompanied polyphonic singing by choirs of men or women, born among farm labourers and inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2014.

The legacy of the estates still colours politics: the region has a strong left-wing tradition, and village associations and workers' clubs remain social centres. Religion is less observed here than in the north. Each town holds its summer festa and livestock fair.

Craft traditions are strong. Arraiolos has made its hand-stitched woollen rugs since at least the 16th century, Estremoz is known for its marble and for its painted clay figurines, recognised by UNESCO, Portalegre for its tapestry workshop, and Reguengos and São Pedro do Corval for pottery. Cork, stripped from the trees by hand every nine years or so, is both an industry and a craft. Whitewashed houses with blue or yellow trim, tall chimneys and small windows are the region's architectural signature.

The three districts cover more than a quarter of mainland Portugal but hold only around 400,000 people, making this the country's emptiest region. Évora, with about 53,000 inhabitants, is the largest town and the only real city; Beja, Portalegre, Elvas and Estremoz are market towns, and many villages have lost more than half their people since the 1950s.

Farming still dominates. Cork, wheat and pigs on the traditional montado, the open woodland of cork and holm oaks, have been joined by irrigated olive and almond plantations fed by the Alqueva reservoir, which have changed the landscape and the economy. Wine is a major industry, marble is quarried around Estremoz, Borba and Vila Viçosa, and Évora's university and hospital are big employers. Around Odemira, export-oriented greenhouse farming depends on immigrant workers, who make up more than a quarter of the municipality's population.

Days are shaped by the heat. Shops and cafés close for a long lunch, older men gather on benches in the square, and summer life moves outdoors in the evening. Rural tourism, wine estates and the coast bring newer income, but ageing, the closure of services and the pull of Lisbon remain the main concerns.

Alentejo cooking turns bread, olive oil, pork and wild herbs into a cuisine of real depth. Açorda alentejana is a bread soup made with garlic, coriander and olive oil, topped with a poached egg; migas are a bread-based dish; and sopa de cação is a dogfish soup with garlic, coriander and vinegar, served with bread. Carne de porco à alentejana combines pork with clams.

The prized meat is porco preto, the black Iberian pig raised on acorns in the montado; its meat is grilled, and its ham and sausages are cured. The region's cheeses include semi-soft Serpa and the sheep's cheeses of Évora and Nisa, all with protected designation. Olive oil from Moura has protected designation.

Convent sweets are rich in egg and sugar: sericaia, a cinnamon egg pudding eaten with the sugared plums of Elvas, and pão de rala, an almond and egg cake. The Alentejo is now one of Portugal's leading wine regions, with full-bodied reds from Reguengos, Borba and Vidigueira, where the old tradition of vinho de talha, wine fermented in large clay amphorae, has been revived.

Évora, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, packs its sights inside medieval walls: the Roman temple, the Gothic cathedral, the Chapel of Bones in the church of São Francisco, lined with skulls and bones, and the arcaded Praça do Giraldo. West of the city stand the Almendres Cromlech and the Zambujeiro dolmen. Arraiolos, Estremoz, with its castle and marble town, and Vila Viçosa, with the Ducal Palace of the Braganzas, lie to the northeast, and Elvas, a UNESCO-listed garrison town, has star-shaped fortifications and the long Amoreira aqueduct.

Monsaraz sits on a hilltop in walls above the Alqueva, the largest artificial lake in Western Europe. Further north, Marvão crowns a quartzite ridge in the Serra de São Mamede Natural Park, with the ruins of the Roman town of Ammaia below and the hill town of Castelo de Vide nearby.

In the south, Beja has its castle keep and the Convent of Our Lady of the Conception, now the regional museum. Mértola climbs above the Guadiana with its castle, former mosque and Islamic museums, and the abandoned copper workings of São Domingos lie nearby. On the coast, Vila Nova de Milfontes sits at the mouth of the Mira within the Southwest Alentejo and Vicentine Coast Natural Park, and the Fishermen's Trail runs south along the cliffs to Zambujeira do Mar.