São Jorge Castle Portugal

Legendary

The Portuguese conquered the Moors in the 1147 Siege of Lisbon to take this castle.

Photo by Dennis Sylveste

People have lived on this hill since at least the 8th century BC, nearly 3,000 years ago. Before there was a castle, there were Phoenicians, then Carthaginians, then Romans, then Moors, each one building on what came before.

The oldest fortifications on the site date to the 2nd century BC. Every group that took Lisbon took this hill first, because whoever holds it can see the whole city and the Tagus River below.

Muslim forces controlled Lisbon from the 8th century AD onward, and the castle you see today grew out of their fortress. They called it the alcáçova, a fortified citadel.

That ended in 1147. Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, laid siege to Lisbon with help from Northern European crusaders sailing to the Holy Land, and after months of fighting the city fell.

The castle became a royal residence. When Lisbon became Portugal's capital in 1255, kings lived here, and around 1300 King Denis turned the old Muslim palace into a proper royal one.

In 1373, an army from the neighboring kingdom of Castile besieged Lisbon. The city had long since spread beyond its old walls, leaving whole neighborhoods undefended.

King Ferdinand ordered a new wall, and it went up fast. Between 1373 and 1375, residents from Lisbon and the surrounding countryside built 4.7 kilometers of wall with 77 towers and dozens of gates, more than doubling the protected area of the city.

The castle got its saint's name a few years later. In 1387, King João I dedicated it to Saint George, the patron saint of England, to honor Portugal's alliance with the English, which is still the oldest alliance in the world.

Kings moved out in the 1500s, and the castle became a barracks, a prison, and a hospital. The great earthquake of 1755 wrecked much of what was left.

A major restoration in the 1940s rebuilt the walls and towers. Today it's a national monument run by the city.

Walk the ramparts and climb the towers for a view across the red rooftops to the Tagus River. Step into the Tower of Ulysses to see the camera obscura, a periscope-like device that projects a live moving image of the city onto a screen. Look for the peacocks that wander the grounds, and find the archaeological site where layers from the Iron Age, the Muslim period, and the royal palace all sit on top of each other.