Beja, Portugal


Beja is a city and a municipality in the Alentejo region, Portugal. The population in 2011 was 35,854, in an area of. The city proper had a population of 21,658 in 2001.
The municipality is the capital of the Beja District. The present Mayor is Paulo Arsénio, elected by the Socialist Party with an absolute majority in the 2017 Portuguese Local Elections. The municipal holiday is Ascension Day. The Portuguese Air Force has an airbase in the area – the Air Base No. 11.

History

Situated on a hill, commanding a strategic position over the vast plains of the Baixo Alentejo, Beja was already an important place in antiquity. Already inhabited in Celtic times, the town was later named Pax Julia by Julius Caesar in 48 BCE, when he made peace with the Lusitanians. He raised the town to be the capital of the southernmost province of Lusitania. During the reign of emperor Augustus the thriving town became Pax Augusta. It was already then a strategic road junction.
When the Visigoths took over the region, the town, then called Paca, became the seat of a bishopric. Saint Aprígio became the first Visigothic bishop of Paca. The town fell to the invading Umayyad army in 713. Thus Paca, through Arabic Baja, became Beja.
Starting in 910 there were successive attempts of conquest and reconquest by the Christian kings. With the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031, Beja became a taifa, an independent Muslim-ruled principality. In 1144 the governor of Beja, Sidray ibn Wazir, helped the rebellion of the Murīdūn led by Abul-Qasim Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-Quasi in the Algarve against power of Seville. In 1150 the town was captured by an army of the Almohads, who annexed it to their North African empire. It was retaken in 1162 by Fernão Gonçalves, leading the army of the Portuguese king Afonso I. In 1175 Beja was recaptured again by the Almohads. It stayed under Muslim rule till 1234 when king Sancho II finally recaptured the town from the Moors.
All these wars depopulated the town and gradually reduced it to rubble. Only with Manuel I in 1521 did Beja again reach the status of city. It was attacked and occupied by the Portuguese and the Spanish armies during the Portuguese Restoration War.
Beja became again the head of a bishopric in 1770, more than a thousand years after the fall of the Visigothic city. In 1808 Napoleonic troops under General Junot sacked the city and massacred the inhabitants.

Geography

Climate

Due to its southernmost location with the descending winds of the subtropics, low precipitation, especially in summer and far from the coast makes the city a hot-summer Mediterranean climate and therefore is the hottest city of Portugal and one of the hottest of the Iberian Peninsula in the maximum temperatures. Between 2001 and 2018 it had the hottest summer of any city in the country, hotter than other cities like Évora, Lisbon or Porto. Although mild by European standards, Beja has relatively cool winters, while summers are long and hot. The high in January is around while the July and August highs are around. Snow is rare but may occur on a few occasions in a century, the last being on January 10, 2019. The January low is and in July and August is. The annual mean is around. The average total rainfall in a year is. The year 2005 was particularly dry in Portugal and Beja suffered devastating forest fires in the surrounding rural areas which contributes to desertification in the Alentejo.

Human geography

Administratively, the municipality is divided into 11 civil parishes :
Beja is twinned with:

Architecture

Castle

The Castle of Beja on top of the hill can be seen from afar and dominates the town. It was built, together with the town walls, under the reign of King Diniz in the 13th century over the remains of a Roman castellum that had been fortified by the Moors. It consists of battlement walls with four square corner towers and a central granite and marble keep, with its height of 40 m the highest in Portugal. The top of the keep can be accessed via a spiral staircase with 197 steps, passing three stellar-vaulted rooms with Gothic windows. The merlons of the machicolation around the keep are topped with small pyramids. Standing on the battlements, one has a sensational panorama of the surrounding landscape. One can also glimpse the remains of the city walls that once had forty turrets and five gates. The castle now houses a small military museum.
The square in front of the castle is named after Gonçalo Mendes da Maia or O Lidador, a brave knight killed in the battle against the Moors in 1170.

Visigothic Museum

The whitewashed Latin-Visigothic church of Santo Amaro, dedicated to Saint Amaro, standing next to the castle, is one of just four pre-Romanesque churches left in Portugal. Some parts date from the 6th century and the interior columns and capitals are carved with foliages and geometric designs from the 7th century. Especially the column with birds attacking a snake is of particular note. It houses today a small archaeological museum with Visigothic art.

Museum of Queen Eleanor">Eleanor of Viseu">Queen Eleanor

This regional museum was set up in 1927 and 1928 in the former Convent of Our Lady of the Conception of the Order of Poor Ladies, gradually expanding its collection. This Franciscan convent had been established in 1459 by Infante Fernando, Duke of Viseu and duke of Beja, next to his ducal palace. The construction continued until 1509.
It is an impressive building with a late-Gothic lattice-worked architrave running along the building. This elegant architrave resembles somewhat the architrave of the Monastery of Batalha, even if there are some early-Manueline influences. Above the entrance porch on the western façade one can see the ajimez window in the room of the abbess, originating from the demolished palace of the dukes of Beja. The entrance door is embedded under an ogee arch. A square bell-tower and a spire with crockets tower above the complex. The convent has been classified as a national monument.
The entrance hall leads to the sumptuously gilded Baroque chapel, consisting of a single nave under a semi-circular vault. Three altars are decorated with gilded woodwork. The fourth altar, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, was decorated with Florentine mosaics by José Ramalho in 1695.
On the wall are three religious azulejos dating from 1741, depicting scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist
The refectory and the claustro are decorated with exquisite azulejos, some dating from Moorish times, others from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
One enters the chapter house through a Manueline portal from the quadra of St. John the Evangelist. The ribbed vault of this square room was distempered during the renovations of 1727. The walls are covered with Arab-Hispanic azulejos with geometric and vegetal designs that are among the most important ceramic decorations in Portugal. Above the azulejos are some semicircular distempered paintings with religious themes: St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, St. Christopher, St. Clare and St. Francis of Assisi.
The museum houses also an important collection of Flemish, Spanish and Portuguese paintings from the 15th to the 18th centuries, among them:
The museum houses also the funeral monuments in late-Gothic style of the first abbess D. Uganda and of the Infante Fernando, Duke of Viseu and his wife Beatriz of Portugal.
The archaeological collection of Fernando Nunes Ribeiro, donated to museum in 1987 after forty years of archaeological research, is on display on the upper floors: Visigothic and Roman artefacts, gravestones from the Bronze Age with antique writings of the Iberians and steles from the Iron Age.
Among the several other artefacts in its collection, the museum possesses the Escudela de Pero de Faria'', a unique piece of Chinese porcelain from 1541.

Museums and monuments

University

Cultural places