Castelo de Silves
Today we finally made it to see Silves Castle – no lockdown and no puppy.
Castelo de Silves dates so far back, it is difficult to trace with accuracy. It is thought that the Romans built fortifications here on top of a Lusitanian castro, dated some time in the Bronze Age. The Romans conquered Silves in 201 BCE, however, and either the Romans or the Visigoths then built on this hill. Fortifications were added later by the Moors between the 8th and the 13th centuries, and the walls were extended. During the reign of Alfonso III of Portugal (13th century), forces under the command of D. Paio Peres Correia took control of the fortress and the region, ending the rule of the Moors in this region.
The castle was damaged in the 1755 earthquake, losing the cathedral and tower, but the castle and its walls remain imposingly impressive. It consists of an irregular polygon on the hilltop in Silves, with four towers and seven crenellated posts, linked together by walls with walkways.
Morgan sitting on what was once upon a time a toilet!
Underneath this gap in the stones, there is a slope down which the waste would have been flushed with a bucket of water, we presume.
Views from the castle out over Silves and the Arade valley:
Water storage solutions
During the Islamic period, various water storage methods were in use, including storage in huge cisterns and the excavation of wells. An enormous water storage facility is located within walls of Castelo de Silves, with a capacity of 1.3m litres! This supplied the city with its water supply right up until the 1980’s:
There’s no water in there now!
You can climb down into the cistern and it now houses an exhibition on the conservation efforts being made for the Iberian Lynx:
At the museum in Silves, which is outside the castle walls, there is a cistern well, one of several in the town.
This one was built by the Moors but only rediscovered in the 1980s. This well features a monolith collar made from Silves sandstone.
Another water storage cistern is found near the cathedral. This one measures 8.5m by 3.4m and is 4.5m deep, and it has a storage capacity of over 133,000L. It would have stored water from the terraced roof tops in Silves as well as from the Rio Arade. You can peer down into it from ground level.