Positioned at altitude, surrounded by a belt of walls, this settlement is one of the former border defensive line historic towns and fortifications, located in the environs of the right bank of the River Guadiana.
With origins steeped in the mists of time, as important vestiges of pre-historic art, megalithic culture and Romanisation bear witness, the development of Monsaraz took place in the Middle Ages. A land disputed by Christians and Muslims, it was a defensive line town on the border between Portugal and Castile during the re-conquest period from the 12th century on. Resettled and given a charter in 1263, it was reinforced and protected in the 14th century when it became an estate of the Order of Christ. The new charter, awarded by King Manuel I in 1512, recognised its economic and military importance, reinforced local power and brought municipal functions more in line with the new times – a situation that continued until the municipality was extinguished in 1851, justified by the progressive loss of its defensive role, which had always been the main factor in its centrality.
Part of the Reguengos de Monsaraz municipality since the mid 19th century, its few inhabitants are scattered between the proud historic centre and the surrounding plane. The ancient nucleus maintains the coherence of the buildings by having kept all of its features, which renders it most attractive in the cultural tourism area. The architecture expresses the existence of erudite models and more banal solutions side-by-side, which reflect ancestral borrowings and belong to a framework of long-term processes. In addition to the great sense of harmony and simplicity, some examples stand out due to their artistic and monumental nature.
With a medieval-type urban structure, it is organised around an ordered layout, inspired by the model of the bastides and the new towns.
Rua Direita (Main Street), between the main gate and the place of arms in the castle, is the aggregating element, where the main buildings, such as the Mother Church, the Misericórdia and the former Town Council building, stand. Another street opens out, running parallel and following the lie of the land, which organises the buildings of the former Moorish and Jewish neighbourhoods. These two arteries confer order to the town, completed by the transversal streets that connect to the fields through gates and openings in the walls.
The main street, as you follow it, opens out roughly half way along into D.Nuno Álvares Pereira Square. Essentially rectangular in shape, it stems from the widening of the former Main Street where the main public buildings and facilities stand. It includes its own churchyard, which was originally the feature that spawned this urban space. Roads and alleys that intersect the main road inside the fortified perimeter converge here. Delimitation comes through the sequence of façades, the highlights being the Mother Church, the former Town Council building and the Misericórdia Chapel. Inside the square are the well and the pillory.
Despite the simplicity of the contemporary architecture, the ensemble has a certain sense of the monumental, discernible through the presence of examples of religious and civil architecture. The Mother Church, of the sixteenth century Hall-Church type, has a wide façade framed by the bell towers, which imbues it with a certain rugged power. Despite its size, the façade is simple, in the Portuguese plain architecture style, characteristic of the 16th and 17th centuries. The former Domus Municipalis, with its ground level arcades opening out onto the square, stands out due to its sheer size. The two-storey Misericórdia church, with its scalloped pediment, comes next in the sequence of façades in the street.
The central space, where the main roles of religious and civic life are represented, displays the emblematic features of local history: the pillory and the municipal building, symbols of commune power and, in one of the adjacent streets, the former Domus Justitiae and the large vaulted cistern. Due to its location and it being the place where a high number of items of cultural heritage meet, the square is the place where visitors and residents mix.
The built fabric is composed by regular blocks with an elongated rectangle shape, offering its longer side to the front of the street hierarchically superior, with a plots structure based on a sequentially order of the plots, parallel to each other. The plots present different dimensions but always with a regular shape resembling to narrow and long rectangles that usually cover the entire transversal extent of the block, having often two direct access through the main and secondary streets. The buildings are located in the front of the plot that faces the street and there is a sequential addition of annexes to the main building in the courtyard space. The buildings have between one and two floors, mainly to residential use, having some services and trade in the ground floor. Composed by a continuous built front that probably dates back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, descendant of a vernacular Alentejo housing typology where the physical rebound, of the large chimneys, addorsed to the main facade, stands out.
The selected block is located in the central alignment of the built fabric. Morphologically has a rectangular shape with 36m wide by 60m long and is implanted on a platform with a slight drop to west.
The block is composed by 10 plots with very different dimensions presenting a minimum area of 53m2 and maximum of 4586m2. With the exception of the plots on the corner, the others present rectangular shapes with a bigger length in relation to its width. Plots are arranged in the block space linearly, and depending on its size, and are set up transversally to the block two by two, which provides a front facing the street. The larger plot on the middle space of the block and the plots on the corner are an exception, occupying, in the first case, the entire transversal extent of the block with two fronts facing the street and, the second case, provide one front to the street and another to the alley. The buildings located in the front of the plot have an average of 1.5 floors which results in about 2200m2 of building area.
