Silves

The castle at Silves is the color of dried blood, which sounds ominous until you learn it’s just the local sandstone, quarried and stacked into walls a thousand years ago by Moorish engineers who understood something about permanence. I climbed up from the riverside on a warm April morning, past orange groves heavy with fruit, and the closer I got the more the castle seemed to glow — that deep ochre-red against a hard blue sky, battlements intact enough that you can walk the full perimeter and look down over a town that, under Islamic rule, was once the most important city in the entire Algarve, bigger and richer than Faro or Lagos would become for centuries after.

The Capital Before the Coast Mattered

Under the Moors, Silves was called Xelb, and by the 11th and 12th centuries it was a genuine center of learning and trade, famous enough that Arab poets wrote about its gardens and its silk. The river that now looks modest and reed-lined once carried ships up from the sea, making Silves a port town despite sitting several kilometers inland — a detail that surprised me until a local at the castle ticket office explained the river’s silted up considerably since the 13th century. The Christian conquest in 1189, briefly reversed and finally sealed in 1249, ended Silves’s centuries as regional capital; the title eventually passed to Faro, and the town settled into the quieter, agricultural rhythm it still has today.

I spent the afternoon wandering down from the castle to the Sé, the old cathedral built directly on the site of the main mosque, its Gothic bones visibly patched together from whatever stone was available after the reconquest. Then I did what apparently everyone in Silves does in orange season: bought a bag of fruit straight from a roadside stand outside town, oranges so fresh they were still slightly warm from the sun, juice running down my wrist before I’d even finished the first one. The Algarve’s citrus reputation, I realized, is basically built on groves like these ringing Silves.

When to go: March brings orange blossom season, when the groves around town perfume the whole valley; visit the castle early morning before the day heats up, since the stone walls hold sun with little shade.