Mértola: the village-museum where the mosque became a church

There is something suspended in time about Mértola: a town that looks down from above at the Guadiana — the river separating Portugal from Spain — and that still carries in its DNA the marks of every civilisation that passed through. Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Christians. Each layer left a deposit, and today Mértola is officially a "village-museum": fourteen museum nuclei for a few thousand inhabitants, a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The mosque that prayed in two languages

The most extraordinary monument is the Igreja Matriz, the parish church: a building that from the outside looks like any medieval Portuguese church, but inside reveals its true nature. That forest of columns, those round arches, that nave gathered in shadow — it is a 12th-century mosque, built when Mértola was the capital of a small Islamic taifa. The mihrab, the niche indicating the direction of Mecca, is still there, perfectly preserved in the south apse. The Christian conquest of 1238 did not destroy: it transformed.

The Islamic art museum

The Núcleo do Castelo and the Museu de Arte Islâmica hold one of the most significant collections of Islamic art in Portugal: ceramics, jewellery, amphorae, and manuscripts recovered from hundreds of excavations conducted over the last forty years under the guidance of the Câmara Municipal. Entry is by a cumulative ticket covering all museum nuclei, around six euros.

When to go and what to eat

Mértola is pleasant in spring, when the banks of the Guadiana fill with herons and storks, and in autumn. In summer the heat is African, nearly unbearable. In a town-centre restaurant you'll find cataplana de enguias — eel stew in the traditional copper pan — and açorda de bacalhau, a bread and salt-cod soup that warms the soul. Mértola is 220 kilometres from Faro and 200 from Évora.