Portalegre, capital of the district of the same name, spreads over the lower slopes of the Serra de São Mamede in the Alto Alentejo. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a wealthy town thanks to wool and silk, as its many Baroque mansions show. Today it is a quiet town, little visited by tourists, and a good base for Marvão, Castelo de Vide and the natural park.
Portalegre tapestries
The town's name is linked to Portalegre tapestries, hand-woven with a technique developed in the mid-twentieth century that reproduces paintings with great fidelity, using thousands of shades of wool. Cartoons by artists such as Almada Negreiros, Vieira da Silva and Le Corbusier have been turned into tapestries. The Guy Fino Tapestry Museum, named after one of the founders of the workshop, displays a fine collection and explains the process.
What to see
The cathedral, founded in 1556, has an eighteenth-century façade and a Renaissance interior with paintings and azulejos. Nearby is the house-museum of José Régio, a poet and writer who lived in Portalegre for over thirty years and gathered an astonishing collection of folk art, with hundreds of crucifixes and statues of saints. Some towers remain of the medieval castle. The former Robinson Factory is worth a visit: a cork factory founded in the nineteenth century by an English industrialist and active until recently, it is now a cultural space and a reminder of the importance of cork, of which Portugal is the world's leading producer.
Surroundings
The Serra de São Mamede Natural Park has chestnut groves, oak woods and trails with views into Spain. Nearby are the villages of Alegrete and Carreiras, the town of Crato with the Flor da Rosa monastery, now a pousada, and countryside of cork oaks and olives. Portalegre is about two and a half hours from Lisbon by car or bus.