[6] The fortress is located on a steep promontory to the east of Cape St. Vincent,[7] about 1 km long, 300 m wide and 40 m high, chosen as the site for the erection precisely because of its privileged position of control over the surrounding coastline.

[8] The area is now included in the Southwest Alentejo and Vicentine Coast Natural Park, known for its complex faunal and floral biodiversity, with unique specimens in the region.

[16] Inside the fortress is the Church of Nossa Senhora da Graça, founded during the time of Henry the Navigator and originally dedicated to Saint Mary.

[20] In 2018, the Fortress of Sagres was the most visited monument in the Algarve and probably in the area south of the Tagus River,[6] having recorded nearly half a million visitors that year.

[22] Human occupation of the region dates back to at least the Early Neolithic, according to remains found at the archaeological site of Cabranosa, northwest of the village of Sagres.

[24] The area gained great importance from a spiritual point of view as the alleged burial place of St. Vincent after his martyrdom by the Roman official Dacian.

[15] This temple would have been frequented mainly by Mozarabs, functioning until the 12th century, when the saint's mortal remains were transferred to Lisbon by order of King Afonso I of Portugal.

[26] In the years that followed, Henry undertook to create his own land holdings in the Sagres region, and in 1961 historian Alberto Iria advanced a theory about the original location of the village founded by the Infante as his official residence.

The original complex, according to graphic sources left to us by Drake's Englishmen in the 16th century,[5][27] had a central building with a small staircase and two visible fireplaces that was possibly the palace of the Infante.

At that time, the village was still considered an unpleasant place, although it experienced some growth in the 1450s, mainly due to the Infante's companions (e.g., the Venetian navigator Alvise Da Mosto had arrived there in 1454)[29] and several people who were exiled there.

[31] After the death of Henry the Navigator, the city entered a period of decadence and changed administrators several times until the end of the reign of John II of Portugal in 1495.

[5] On October 29, 1471, King Afonso V gave the fiefdom of the city, up to Cape St. Vincent, to Rui de Sousa, while on June 22, 1487, an inhabitant of Raposeira, Rodrigo Anes, received the benefit of the captaincy of the village of Sagres.

"[32] However, the Village of the Infante did not start functioning until around 1446, several years after the first major advances in African coastal navigation were made, such as the passage of Cape Bojador by Gil Eanes, which debunks the myth of the Sagres school.

This tradition has been sensibly based on historical events, as the cape was one of the inspirations for the Infante to initiate African sailings, so Sagres can be said to have played a primordial role in the beginning of Portuguese discoveries.

[28] However, the existence of the Sagres school cannot be completely ruled out, although to be scaled down and/or relocated, for example to the nearby city of Lagos, the real center of sailings in Henry's time.

On October 4, 1521, Rodrigo Anes' son Alexandre de Freitas received the ranks of captain and chief mayor of the city of Sagres.

[4][5][7] In 1587, the English privateer Francis Drake made several raids along the Algarve coast: he sacked the village of Sagres and destroyed much of the fortress.

[5] According to historian Ataíde Oliveira, the fortresses of São Vicente and Sagres were subdued without resistance soon after the Restoration of Independence on December 1, 1640, which freed the country from Spanish rule.

Reconstruction work was only carried out starting in 1793, coordinated by José de Sande Vasconcelos, who followed a new model, bringing profound changes in the layout of the fortress.

Fontoura da Costa, who was involved in the work, argued that the Henrician city was located in more or less the same place where the fortress was later built, and it was therefore hypothesized that the oldest remains found (the "Rose of the Winds," a section of inner wall, partially hidden by the ensemble of houses, known as the "creek") were part of the Village.

[39] In the 1980s, the General Directorate for Buildings and National Monuments restored the fortress several times and in 1988 announced a competition to adapt it to tourist demand.

The work provoked an outcry from locals who criticized João Carreira's design with modern lines, and the controversy blocked the construction of part of the new buildings: a 260 m corridor (8 m high and 6 m wide) to show the Via dos Descobrimentos.

[4][41] In the early 2000s, Sagres became a candidate for UNESCO World Heritage status, but in 2003 the Portuguese Commission closed the case and suggested instead that the village be part of a larger geographic project encompassing the entire Costa Vicentina.

In December 2006, the Minister of Culture, Isabel Pires de Lima, published the list of 21 national monuments that would participate in the competition for the Seven Wonders of Portugal, including the Fortress of Sagres.

[8][41][43] Between 2009 and 2010, there was the first phase of the Project of Requalification and Valorization of the Promontory of Sagres, part of the National Strategic Framework of Tourism Intervention of the Portuguese Tourism Board, Regional Coordination and Commission for the Development of the Algarve and Regional Directorate for Culture of the Algarve: more than 3 million euros of landscaping works, conservative maintenance of the fortress and its reorganization, geophysical studies on the "Wind Rose," installation of a two-kilometer walkway for users with reduced mobility, reclassification of buildings built in the 1990s, etc.

[4][16] Between April and May 2012, the Fortress of Sagres Fairgrounds project was unveiled, with a budget of about 1.3 million euros, part of the site's redevelopment program with completion scheduled for 2014, to be installed in one of the buildings constructed in the 1990s, the so-called "cod warehouse."

The Secretary of State for Culture, Francisco José Viegas, declared that this would be the most significant element of the second phase of the redevelopment program, a strategic intervention for the country but lacking in funds yet to be released.

The permanent exhibition was divided into six thematic cells: life aboard a caravel, Infante Henry's workroom, a demonstration of how Portuguese is spoken on different continents, etc.

[53] On November 12, a Eucharist was celebrated in the Church of Nossa Senhora da Graça in honor of the 500th anniversary of the creation of the parish of Sagres, and a plaque commemorating this event was unveiled.

[33] In January 2020, the Portuguese Environment Agency announced that it would spend about 27 million euros on work to defend monuments from the effects of climate change, including the Fortress of Sagres, where the cliff next to the western bastion was to be stabilized.