The hill of São Pedro das Cabeças
Five kilometers from the town of Castro Verde rises the hill of São Pedro das Cabeças, a bare mound where oral tradition and local collective memory locate the exact setting of the Battle of Ourique, fought on July 25, 1139. According to the narrative consecrated by legend, it was on this precise relief of Baixo Alentejo that D. Afonso Henriques allegedly defeated five Moorish kings, after being approached by a miraculous apparition of crucified Christ that guaranteed him victory and the founding of a new independent kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula.
The importance attributed to the site is reflected in the persistence of secular rituals and the way the landscape has been shaped over the centuries to celebrate the event. The structure of the Hermitage of São Pedro das Cabeças displays on its facade the inscription of the year 1709, corresponding to a reconstruction of Mannerist and vernacular features erected at the top of the hill to perpetuate the memory of that July 25 of the 12th century.
In 1795, Queen D. Maria I ordered a commemorative marble monument to be erected at the same site of São Pedro das Cabeças, carved by the sculptor Joaquim Machado de Castro. The epigraphic Latin inscriptions carved into the stone praised the slaughter of the Saracen armies and the blood that, according to monarchical veneration, would have stained the waters of the nearby Ribeira de Cobres.
The royal monumentalization of the myth
The desire to consolidate the legend of Ourique in the territory of Castro Verde was not limited to the isolation of the hill and generated a profound urban transformation in the town itself. The known documentary first visitation by the friars of the Order of Santiago to the primitive temple of Castro Verde dates back to 1510, attesting to a prior and smaller parish church, long before the monumental buildings that would come to mark the local physiognomy.
Decades later, King D. Sebastião ordered in 1573 the complete demolition of that old medieval temple to order the construction from scratch of the Royal Basilica of Our Lady of the Conception. The express purpose of the crown was to monumentalize the victory of Ourique, transforming Castro Verde into a living sanctuary of dynastic legitimation and the spiritual sovereignty of the Portuguese kingdom.
Inside, the temple quickly transformed into a narrative museum of the legend. The walls of the nave of the Royal Basilica were covered in the first half of the 18th century — more precisely around 1730 — by vast compositions of blue and white azulejos, depicting in detail the military clashes and divine intervention in favor of the first Portuguese monarch.
The materialization of the legend in painting
The visual fixation of the narrative was not exhausted in the decorative pottery of the azulejos and found in easel painting a powerful ally to shape popular belief. Between 1763 and 1767, the Algarvian painter Diogo Magina produced an important cycle of oil canvases destined for the Church of Chagas do Salvador, currently designated as the Church of Our Lady of Remedies, located in Castro Verde.
These material works visually channeled the crucial moments of the legend of Ourique, offering the faithful and visitors of the municipality an unquestionable artistic representation of the miracle of Christ and the subjugation of the five Saracen kings. The circulation of these images reinforced the symbiosis between the urban identity of Castro Verde and the founding myth propagated by the royal chroniclers of previous centuries.
The strength of these representations crossed the centuries and, on November 30, 1993, the Portuguese State officially recognized the heritage value of the complex by publishing Decree No. 45/93 in the Diário da República, initially classifying the Mother Church of Castro Verde as a Property of Public Interest, a status that preceded the recent national legal valuation.
The critical dismantling of the myth
Despite the monumentality of the Royal Basilica and the Hermitage of São Pedro das Cabeças, the interpretation that these buildings prove the occurrence of the battle on Castrense soil collides frontally with modern historiographical research and archaeological data collected in the field. In 1846, in volume I of his 'History of Portugal', the writer and historian Alexandre Herculano relentlessly dismantled the factual reading of divine intervention and the so-called 'Oath of Afonso Henriques', demonstrating documentarily that the miracle consisted of a late literary and political elaboration formulated centuries later in the 'Chronicle of 1419'.
This critical review was later deepened by historians such as José Mattoso, whose research sustained that the 1139 clash was nothing more than a 'fossado' — a short-duration mobile military incursion aimed exclusively at gathering spoils and cattle — radically distancing itself from the epic combat with hundreds of thousands of Almoravid combatants conveyed by the 16th-century legend. In parallel, archaeological surveys carried out at the site of São Pedro das Cabeças under the registry of the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage identified structures from the Chalcolithic period, the Second Iron Age, and even a Roman military fortification, but revealed the absolute absence of any material trace or medieval weaponry referring to the supposed pitched battle.
Territorial and political contradictions surrounding the myth also generated geographic rivalries outside Alentejo. In stark contrast to the historical claim between Castro Verde and the neighboring municipality of Ourique, the municipality of Cartaxo officialized a totally alternative location for the same mythical combat by inaugurating, in 1932, the Monument to the Battle of Ourique in the locality of Vila Chã de Ourique, demonstrating that the geography of the legend is malleable and serves different political purposes depending on the era.
The persistence of ritual in the present
Rigorous separation between literary myth and the absence of archaeological evidence did not prevent the town from continuing to manage its physical heritage based on the legend. The commemorative marble monument carved by Joaquim Machado de Castro, originally erected on the hill in 1795, ended up being struck and severely damaged by an atmospheric electrical discharge, which forced the municipality to transfer it on July 25, 1960, to Praça do Município, in the urban center of Castro Verde.
Other vestiges of the region attest to equally complex networks of beliefs, such as that documented by the oral ethnographic tradition of the municipality surrounding the legend of the Seven Sister Hermitages. This tradition defines that, from the Hermitage of Our Lady of Aracelis — situated at 276 meters of altitude in the parish of Castro Verde, in São Marcos da Ataboeira —, it is possible to sight six other sanctuaries with deep visual and ritual connections extended across the landscapes of Alentejo and Algarve.
Currently, state officialdom continues to intersect with the legendary heritage through concrete administrative and ceremonial acts. The Council of Ministers formalized through Decree No. 18/2023 the upgrade of the mother church to a National Monument, granting it the official designation of Royal Basilica of Castro Verde based on the historical foundation of its construction affiliated with the Alfonsine memory, while the Portuguese Army and the City Council annually maintain the formal holding of military and evocative ceremonies on the hill of São Pedro das Cabeças on each July 25.