If you stand on the roof of Aljezur's castle and look east, you see cork oaks and hills. If you look west, you see a plain of rice fields and, beyond them, the Atlantic. That view is the whole story of this town. Aljezur was built where it was because the hill gives you sightlines in every direction, you can see who is coming, by land or by sea, in time to do something about it. For a thousand years, that mattered a lot.
The Moorish century
People lived in this valley long before Aljezur was Aljezur, Neolithic settlements, later a corner of Roman Lusitania, but the town's name and its castle both come from the Moors. Aljezur derives from the Arabic Al-Jazur, meaning "the islands", a reference to what the valley looked like when it flooded in winter and the town on the hill became one of several rocky outcrops rising above the water.
The Moors arrived in the eighth century and built the castle you can still walk around today. Their Aljezur was a small fortified town on the hill, with houses spilling down the slope towards the river. The castle was modest by Moorish standards, no grand palace, no elaborate gardens, but strategically placed. From its walls the Moors could see the coast at Arrifana, the mouth of the river towards Amoreira, and the road inland towards what is now Marmelete. For four hundred years, this arrangement worked.
The reconquest, and a long quiet
Aljezur was one of the last places in the Algarve to be taken back by the Christian kingdoms of the north. The date is precise and slightly comedic: 1249. The knight who took the castle, Dom Paio Peres Correia, is said to have used a ladder while most of the Moorish garrison was asleep. Whether that is true or was written down that way later is anyone's guess. Either way, Aljezur became Portuguese in the middle of the thirteenth century and has been Portuguese ever since.
What followed was not a golden age. The Christian rulers moved the population off the hill and Aljezur settled into a long period as a small farming and fishing town, more or less forgotten by the rest of the country. It shows up occasionally in royal documents, a tax dispute in the 1400s, a plague in the 1500s, but for most of its post-reconquest history, Aljezur was a place that other people did not think about.
The earthquake that redrew the town
On the morning of 1 November 1755, the great Lisbon earthquake struck, one of the largest seismic events in European history. In Aljezur the tremor was strong enough to collapse the medieval upper town almost entirely. The castle walls survived, more or less, but the houses that had clung to the hill for five centuries came down.
What is now the centre of Aljezur, the part you walk through today, with Rua 25 de Abril and the Igreja Matriz and the small square by the river, was largely built after the earthquake. The town shifted permanently down into the flat area next to the river. The old town on the hill was left in the state you can still see: a shell, a few ruined walls, and the castle keep.
Emigration, and the sweet potato that saved the town
For much of the twentieth century, Aljezur emptied out. Portugal's rural areas suffered under the Salazar dictatorship: little investment, poor roads, and few opportunities meant generation after generation of young Aljezurenses left, for Lisbon, France, Germany, Brazil. In 1960 the municipality had around 8,000 residents. By 1991 it was below 5,000. The town was quietly dying.
The road along the west coast was only fully paved in the 1980s. Until then, Aljezur was genuinely remote, three hours from Lisbon on bad roads, effectively off the tourism map. When the first surfers started arriving in the 1970s, they were treated as a curiosity. Nobody yet understood what was coming.
Aljezur's recovery is only partly a surf story. The other half is a vegetable. In the 1990s local farmers organised a cooperative around the batata doce de Aljezur, a sweet potato variety with orange flesh, an unusually sweet flavour, and a growing cycle perfectly suited to the sandy soil of the valley. They eventually won IGP protection from the European Union in 2009, the same legal status that protects Parma ham and Champagne. That designation turned the crop from a subsistence product into an export product, and gave the town an identity.
The Festival da Batata Doce, held every November since the 1990s, now draws tens of thousands over a single weekend. It is not glamorous, sweet potato bread, cake, ice cream, folk music, but it works. It is the single event that most reliably fills every guest bed in the municipality outside the summer season.
The town today
Aljezur has around 5,500 residents in the municipality and maybe 1,500 in the town itself. It has a good bakery, a Saturday farmers market, three supermarkets, a health centre, a school, and a football club in the regional league. Tourism has become the largest source of income, but the town has been careful, no high-rise hotels, no golf resorts, no marina. Most of what has been built in the last thirty years is small, low, and set back from the coast.
The castle is still on the hill. You can walk up in fifteen minutes from the town centre, sit on the wall where a Moorish guard once sat, and see the same coastline that mattered to the Romans, the Moors, the medieval Portuguese, and, eventually, the rest of us. Not much of the original stonework is left, but the view is unchanged. A thousand years of people have looked at it, decided this was a good place to stay, and put down roots. That, more than any list of dates, is the actual history of Aljezur.
If you want a proper local guide to walk you through it, the best in town is Tales of Terra (also on Instagram @talesofterraportugal). They tell the story the way it deserves to be told, on foot, in the places it happened.
Want to see the castle and the rest of the old town?
I can point you at the walk, the small museum most people miss, and the bakery on the way back down. Write me a line, I answer myself.