Castle of Lagos

Due to its harbour, as well as facilities where Caravels and other vessels were built, Lagos played a crucial role in the rise of the Portuguese Empire.

King John II and his successor also carried out conservation work on the defenses of Lagos, who endowed it with an aqueduct for the water supply, built somewhere between 1490 and 1521.

Under the expansionist project of King Sebastian (1568–1578), Lagos became a city in 1573, becoming the capital of the Kingdom of the Algarve and the residence of the Captains General and Governors.

The damage applied by the English artillery to Lagos, as well as the fear of new attacks on the coast, led to the reconstruction and modernization of its defenses in the following years.

At the time of the restoration of Portuguese independence, conservation works were undertaken on the walls (1642), when the proposal to build a large, pentagonal plant with five bastions at the corners, in the south of the city (1643) was approved.

[2] From the second half of the 1950s, the government, through the Directorate General for National Buildings and Monuments, in view of the celebrations of Centenarians, conducted a wide intervention in the built-up heritage of Lagos, rebuilding addorsed buildings to ancient walls and bulwarks, rebuilding the Palace of the Governors, sections of walls and constructed the Discovery Avenue (Avenida dos Descobrimentos), a landfilled increased protection area between the city and the sea.

The new fence, adapted to firearm artillery, is made up of three flank bastions (from Santa Maria, Alcaria and São Francisco) and four towers (the Praça de Armas, the Conception, Porta Room and Santo Amaro).