Mértola stands on a rocky spur where the Guadiana river meets the Oeiras, in the south-east of the Alentejo. The Guadiana was navigable up to here, so for centuries the town was an important river port: Roman Myrtilis and then Arab Martulah, for a time the capital of a small independent kingdom (taifa) in the eleventh century. Today it is a village of a few thousand people, but its wealth of remains has earned it the name "vila museu", the museum town.
The church that was a mosque
The most extraordinary monument is the mother church, once the town's great mosque: turned into a church after the Christian reconquest of 1238, it keeps its five-aisled plan with columns, and above all the mihrab, the niche facing Mecca, is still visible behind the altar. It is considered the best-preserved mosque in Portugal.
The castle and museums
Above the church is the castle, with its thirteenth-century keep, and at its foot the archaeological area of the Alcáçova, with the remains of an Islamic quarter, an early Christian baptistery and mosaics. The village has a network of museum centres: the Islamic museum, with one of the country's most important collections of Islamic pottery, the Roman museum in the foundations of the town hall, the early Christian museum, sacred art and the weaver's house. A single ticket covers them all.
Festival and nature
Every two years, in May, the Mértola Islamic Festival turns the village into a souk, with music, crafts and food from the Mediterranean and North Africa. Around the village stretches the Vale do Guadiana Natural Park, with gorges, birds of prey and the Pulo do Lobo waterfall, where the river squeezes between rocks. About twenty kilometres away, the abandoned São Domingos mine, worked since Roman times and closed in 1966, offers a lunar landscape of coloured rocks and a river beach.
Getting there
Mértola is about 45 minutes by car from Beja or about an hour from Vila Real de Santo António in the Algarve; bus links are limited.