Liberal Revolutions & Nation-State

The Portuguese realm and its Atlantic crown.

1 chapter

1640 - 1820

The Restoration of Portuguese independence in 1640 brought the House of Braganza to the throne and cemented the latifundio system that would define Alentejo society for centuries. Vila Viçosa, the Braganza ducal seat, became a royal residence — its Ducal Palace still houses the Fundação da Casa de Bragança, maintaining the collections and archive of Portugal's last ruling dynasty. The colossal fortifications of Elvas, inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2012, protected the restored border against Spanish invasion with bastioned walls designed by the French engineer Nicolas de Langres; Fort Santa Luzia was commenced in 1641 and completed by 1648. Meanwhile, the great estates of the Alentejo plain — latifúndios worked by landless rural laborers — generated the wealth that underwrote both the military architecture and the aristocratic bullfighting tradition. Montemor-o-Novo's bullring, though the current structure dates from 1882, sits on the site of earlier arenas where the equestrian culture of the cavaleiros (gentleman riders) was displayed — a practice the Estado Novo would later appropriate as national folklore.

1933 - 1974

The Estado Novo under Salazar appropriated folk traditions as emblems of national identity and 'order,' stripping them of social critique. Bullfighting was elevated as a showcase of equestrian aristocratic culture (the tourada à portuguesa promoted at arenas like Montemor-o-Novo) while the popular capeia arraiana of border communities was marginalized. Cante Alentejano — the two-part polyphonic singing of agricultural laborers, miners, and campinos — was censored; the phrase 'O Alentejo Canta, Logo Resiste' captures the suppressed dimension of a practice that the tourist frame presents as timeless folk entertainment. Aljustrel's mining communities, active since Roman times (known then as Vipasca), were centers of labor organization and Cante practice; the UNESCO classification of Cante explicitly tags 'Mining' as a social context. The regime's secret police (PIDE) surveilled Cante groups, and songs with political content were suppressed. Yet the social structure of group singing — the ponto (lower voice) and alto (higher voice) rehearsing in taverns and workplaces — preserved the community's capacity to express collective experience even under censorship, transmitting working-class memory across generations through oral repertoire.

1250 - 1640

The Portuguese monarchy consolidated its southern frontier through military orders, cathedral-building, and walled towns after the Reconquista. The Order of Santiago governed Mértola and Serpa after the 1238 conquest; the Cathedral of Évora, begun in the 13th century, asserted Christian authority on the Roman and Islamic layers beneath it. Marvão Castle, perched on its granite escarpment, controlled the border with Castile — the same frontier that would later shape the capeia arraiana bull-running tradition. Walk Serpa's medieval walls and you read a Christian frontier town: the mosque replaced by a church, the street plan overlaid on an earlier settlement, the Guadiana River still marking the edge of the contested world. The saint's-day feasts (romarias) that structure the Alentejo festival calendar today have their roots in this period's parish organization, though the relationship between liturgical dates and earlier seasonal practices remains uncertain without local documentation for each case.

From 1974

The 1974 Carnation Revolution transformed Alentejo more profoundly than any event since the Reconquista. Landless workers occupied large estates; SAU cooperatives were created; a counter-reform later reversed many of these changes. The memory remains contentious — describe it factually: land occupation, cooperative formation, and legal reversal — but this history shapes Alentejo's community identity and Cante practice to this day. After 1974, Cante expanded its repertoire to include songs of liberation, and 'O Alentejo Canta, Logo Resiste' became a community affirmation. Three UNESCO inscriptions anchor the contemporary heritage landscape: Cante Alentejano (2014), the Festas do Povo de Campo Maior (2021), and the Garrison Border Town of Elvas (2012). The Festival Islâmico in Mértola, held biennially since the 1980s as part of Cláudio Torres's slow archaeology project, transforms the village into a North African souk — a deliberate revival of the Islamic cultural layer that frames itself as 'celebrating the culture that unites us.' Campo Maior's Festas do Povo — organized rua a rua with each street's paper-flower decorations prepared in segredo and revealed on the enramação night — show a community-driven festival model that 'only happens when the people want it.' On the coast, Moita's Festa de Nossa Senhora da Boa Viagem synthesizes maritime and rural traditions with a procession of 30 andores through the town, while Sesimbra's fishing community maintains the xávega seine-net tradition and the Círio pilgrimage to Nossa Senhora do Cabo at Espichel.