Islamic Art and Architecture in the Gharb al-Andalus

Between 711 and 1249, the south of present-day Portugal formed part of the Gharb al-Andalus, the westernmost edge of the Islamic world on the Iberian Peninsula. For more than five centuries, cities such as Lisbon (al-Uśbuna), Santarém (Xantarīn), Mértola (Mārtula), Silves (Xilb) and Faro were poles of an urban, agrarian and mercantile civilisation that left deep marks on the landscape, the language and the material culture of the country. The Islamic art of the Gharb was no peripheral episode: it was the matrix of an entire way of inhabiting and organising space south of the Mondego.

Urbanism and architecture

The Andalusi city was articulated around the medina (almedina), with its congregational mosque, its market and its baths, protected by walls and dominated by a fortified citadel, the alcáçova. The houses, turned towards an inner courtyard and almost blind to the exterior, lined narrow, winding streets — the adarves — that ensured family privacy. This logic of layout survives to this day in the whitewashed houses of many historic centres in the south.

Construction relied above all on rammed earth (taipa) and adobe, at times reinforced with masonry pillars. The most recognisable element is the horseshoe arch, inherited from the Visigothic tradition and adopted as the image par excellence of Muslim architecture on the Peninsula. Military architecture reached great refinement in the defensive lines that still structure towns such as Silves and its Islamic archaeology or the urban centres of the Algarve.

The mihrab of the former mosque of Mértola, preserved in the present parish church, is the only Islamic prayer niche that has survived in Portugal — a rare testimony to how a Muslim place of worship was reconverted, rather than destroyed, after the Reconquista.

Ceramics and material culture

If architecture defines the landscape, it is ceramics that best document daily life in the Gharb. Excavations in the citadels and rural hamlets (alcarias) have revealed an abundant repertoire of kitchen and tableware, with glazes, cuerda seca decoration, geometric, stylised vegetal and epigraphic motifs. The prohibition of the figurative image, for fear of idolatry, steered ornamentation towards abstraction, calligraphy and arabesques. These materials today form the core of Portuguese Islamic archaeology and are particularly well represented in archaeological Mértola, which holds the most important collection in the country.

Andalusi pottery production would also influence, centuries later, the Iberian tradition of azulejos and faience, in a thread of continuity that links these medieval workshops to the later currents of decorative ceramics.

A legacy that endures

The end of Islamic rule did not erase its heritage. More than a thousand words of Arabic origin survive in Portuguese, especially in the spheres of agriculture, hydraulics and administration, and countless place names — Alfama, Alcácer, Odiana, the Algarve itself (al-gharb, “the west”) — perpetuate that memory. Irrigation systems, agricultural techniques, the white of lime and the layout of towns are so many other living traces. This ensemble belongs to the broader Moorish and Islamic heritage that distinguishes the southern Peninsula and that is inscribed, within the course of the periods and styles of Portuguese art, as one of its founding layers.

To understand the Gharb al-Andalus is therefore indispensable for reading the long history of the territory correctly: much of what seems “traditional” in southern Portugal has its roots in this civilisation that flourished here for more than five hundred years.