Built before the dawn of recorded history, Portugal’s many prehistoric monuments bear silent witness to the country’s long and chequered history.
There’s evidence of human life in Portugal some 30,000 years ago, beginning at a time when ice covered much of Europe, with the caves discovered at Escoural west of Évora (in the heart of the Alentejo region) containing the earliest vestiges of human occupation dating back to around this time.
Additionally, a large number of flint arrowheads and blades have been excavated all over the Portuguese mainland, thus proving that hunters existed here in the Stone Age, most probably arriving from Galicia in the north or from across the great Alentejo plains in the south.
During the great thaw of the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, Portugal’s earliest inhabitants extended their range deeper into the territory where a number of dolmens, menhirs and stone circles can still be seen today.
And their successors constructed an impressive array of hilltop castros, or fortified villages, the best-preserved being Citânia de Briteiros which covers several acres of land near the ancient city of Guimarães (the so-called Cradle of the Nation), right in the heart of the Minho region of northern Portugal.
With its three sturdy outer walls, the near-intact Citânia de Briteiros stands as a truly astonishing piece of prehistoric town planning with paved roadways, robust water tanks featuring elaborate spouts and stone channels for the all-important water supply.
By approximately 4,000 BC, groups of people had already settled in communities large enough to construct the megalithic monuments that still dot the Portuguese landscape today, in the form of tall standing stones, passage tombs and menhirs.
Archaeological sites in Portugal
One particular Megalithic masterpiece is the monumental cult structure erected during the Chalcolithic period in the form of the imposing Barrosa Dolmen in the extreme north of Portugal.
Some of the earliest remains in the Lisbon area are the collective tombs at Palmela and Alapraia (near Estoril) which are easily accessible from the Portuguese capital, while the oldest vestiges of human occupation in the Cascais Coast region were identified at the Talaíde/Serigado archaeological site where some excavated items date back to the Lower Paleolithic period.
A succession of primitive civilisations subsequently left an impressive collection of traces all over the country in caves and grottoes as far and wide as Soaja (Arcos de Valdevez), Germil (Ponte de Barca), Zambujeiro (the tallest in Portugal), Comenda (in the Alentejo region due east of Lisbon) and Outeiro Machado near Chaves in northern Portugal’s remote Trás-os-Montes region.
It was during the Palaeolithic period that some of Portugal’s earliest inhabitants created a series of impressive open-air rock etchings near Vila Nova de Foz Côa where a large number of animal figures have been engraved over several millennia.
The Phoenicians not only traded along Portugal’s idyllic western and southern coastlines but established sturdy settlements in various places such as Aveiro south of Porto and Nazaré (famous for its big-wave surfing) where today’s residents still show strong signs of their Phoenician roots in their features.
Visitors to the amazing Martins Sarmento Museum in Guimarães can immerse themselves in a vast range of exhibits dating right back to the Stone Age. Housed in the Gothic cloister of the 14th-century convent of São Domingues, it was named after the archaeologist who excavated major Iron Age sites all over northern Portugal in the 19th century.
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