Marvão and Castelo de Vide
The highest walls in the Alentejo, and a spring-fed town below them with one of the oldest Jewish quarters in Portugal.
Marvão is a walled village on a quartzite ridge.
It sits at around 860 metres inside the Serra de São Mamede natural park, with the whole border plain on one side and Spain on the other. The village inside the walls is a few hundred people and a handful of streets. It was never taken by assault, which is easy to believe once you have walked the ramparts.
Castelo de Vide, twenty minutes down the road.
A whitewashed town of springs and Gothic doorways under its own castle. The Judiaria, the medieval Jewish quarter, is one of the best preserved in the country and includes a synagogue building dated to the fourteenth century. The town's fountains still run and locals still fill bottles at them.
The park between them.
São Mamede is greener than the rest of the Alentejo — chestnut and oak instead of cork and stubble, because the altitude catches the rain. There are Iron Age and Roman sites nearby, including the Roman town of Ammaia at the foot of Marvão, and some of the best birdwatching in the interior.
Eat and drink like the interior, not the coast.
This is the Portalegre end of the Alentejo: sheep cheese, black pork, migas, game in autumn, and wines from higher, cooler vineyards than the Évora plain. Portions are large and lunch is the main event.
How to arrive.
Marvão is roughly three hours from Lisbon and about ninety minutes from Évora, so it works as an overnight or as a leg towards Spain. It is one of the few places in Portugal where staying inside the walls is worth the small hotel rooms — the village empties at six and the view stays.