Monsaraz Megalithic Complex

Around the hill of Monsaraz and the vast plain that descends towards the Guadiana is concentrated one of the densest megalithic ensembles in Portugal. The municipality of Reguengos de Monsaraz brings together more than one hundred and fifty prehistoric archaeological occurrences — cromlechs, isolated menhirs, dolmens and rock art stations — testimony to communities of herders and farmers who, over the 5th, 4th and 3rd millennia BC, marked this territory with stone.

The Xerez cromlech

The best-known piece of the ensemble is the cromeleque do Xerez, identified in 1969: an enclosure of more than fifty monoliths around a large central menhir, several of them decorated. The Alqueva reservoir made it necessary to remove it from its original site, and the enclosure was reconstituted near the Convento da Orada, close to Monsaraz. Its history, its classification as a Property of Public Interest and the limits of the reconstitution are explained in the dedicated guide; here the interest lies above all in it being part of a wider megalithic landscape, comparable to the great enclosures of central Alentejo, such as the cromeleque dos Almendres, near Évora.

Menhirs and dolmens in the territory

The complex is not confined to Xerez. Scattered across the municipality is a remarkable set of monuments. The Outeiro menhir, at nearly six metres, is one of the largest isolated menhirs in the Iberian Peninsula. The Rocha dos Namorados, a granite outcrop raised to over two metres and decorated with cup-marks, still retains an associated popular ritual of throwing stones onto its summit. The dolmens of Olival da Pega, collective burial chambers with corridors built between about 3500 and 3000 BC, preserved remains of more than one hundred individuals, revealing the funerary and communal dimension of these populations.

As a whole, these monuments belong to the broader universe of megalithism and Portuguese megalithic art, of which the engraved menhirs are the greatest expression — a theme developed in the study of statue-menhirs and stelae. Visiting them from the fortified village of Monsaraz means traversing, in a single day, several millennia of human occupation in central Alentejo.