Linhares Castle, Celorico da Beira

Castle of Linhares stands within Celorico da Beira in Portugal; the surviving fortress dates to the medieval period, while the hilltop was occupied earlier by Iberian, Roman, Visigothic and Muslim communities. Occupation may reach back to the Turduli around 850 BCE, and after the Roman conquest the settlement lay beside a Roman road linking Conimbriga with the confluence near Guarda. Visigothic and Muslim presence followed, and Muslim inhabitants constructed a fortified position here before the Christian reconquest.

The settlement received a royal charter from King Afonso I in 1169, a grant said to have been confirmed by Afonso II in 1217. The first clear medieval reference to the castle appears in the early reign of Sancho I during an invasion from León, when Rodrigo and Gonçalo Mendes are recorded as fortress mayors; a chapel called Our Lady of the Açores and an annual pilgrimage on 3 May are connected with that episode.

Repairs to the fortifications are documented in the mid-thirteenth century, when nearby inhabitants were obliged to provide labour for regional castles. A later building campaign took place under King Denis, who granted the town and fortress to his son Fernão Sanches, and subsequent Gothic alterations to towers and battlements are attributed to later medieval monarchs. In 1373 forces of Henry of Castile besieged and took the castle. During the 1383–85 dynastic crisis the fortress’s mayor Martim Afonso de Melo backed Queen Beatrice and King John I; the lordship of Linhares was granted to Egas Coelho on 14 August 1384 and was later held by Martim Vasques da Cunha. The castle declined in military importance thereafter.

In the seventeenth century a public clock was placed in one tower, and that tower was later linked to an external bell in 1817. By the early twentieth century the complex had fallen into serious ruin; it was designated a National Monument on 17 June 1922 and state conservation work began in the 1940s and 1950s. Twentieth- and later-century interventions removed rubble, rebuilt sections of curtain wall, repaired towers and roofs, renewed metal stairways and added protective guards while reorganizing interior layouts.