Tavira Guide

With the fall of these cities, one part of the population, generally the richer and more influential elements, moved towards the South, establishing themselves in the developed urban hubs on the Algarve’s coast. Between the Christian lands and the area where they now sought refuge, lay vast swathes of Alentejan heath, from whence raids by the Christian armies in the mountains of the Algarve would be launched.

Those who sought refuge there included Muslims, Christian Arabs, Jews and renegade Christians, forming a wealthy population but ill disposed to obeying an authority from beyond their territory.

The political situation of the Spanish Muslims and the unstoppable advance of the Christian armies so threatened Western Islam that the members of an emerging religious movement from Maghreb, the Almoadas, forced intense military intervention in the Iberian Peninsula.

The force of the Almoadans was so great that they conquered and reunified almost all of the peninsular South in no time, and even conquered Leiria. The principal danger lay in the North, and perhaps for this reason Tavira was not immediately affected by their intervention. It is true that chroniclers favouring the Almoadans referred to Tavira in not so flattering terms, classifying it as a home for pirates, infidels and renegades, however it took them several years to intervene in this city. The time which elapsed between the Almoadan invasion in 1146 and the fall of the city in 1167-8, was used by the inhabitants to fortify it, making it almost unbreachable.

As proven by excavations carried out in 1996, in the tier of houses in front of the Town Hall, boroughs were destroyed in the XIth and XIIth centuries, to make way for a strong wall, sometimes with a thickness of 4m and tom tall. This defensive wall was built in the so-called cyclopean taipa (horny wall), consisting of an amalgam of stone and lime mortar, of great strength, and with the faces covered in faceted stones, which were strongly bound to the same mortar, which served as a casing (see sheet 1). The outside was plastered and white-washed with lime with ingrained ochre.

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