The history of Albufeira

Fresh springs drew three ancient peoples to this sand

The name comes first, and it explains everything else. Olhos de Água means "eyes of water." Fresh springs push up through the beach sand here, and you can still see them break the surface when the tide runs low. That water is the whole reason anyone ever stopped here.

Phoenician and Carthaginian sailors found the springs first, according to the local history kept by the parish itself. They camped beside the water and fished the coast. Roman settlers followed and stayed longer. They dug tanks into the ground to salt and dry fish, a trade that ran the length of this shore for centuries. Workers found the remains of those Roman salting tanks at Barranco das Belharucas Beach. They also found them at Santa Eulália. Both places are a short walk from here.

A spring, a beach, and a reason to stay were enough. Three separate peoples settled here, one after another. They left nothing written down but the tanks in the ground.

A parish existed, then Lisbon erased its name

Olhos de Água became its own parish in 1997, carved out of Albufeira by national law. It held its own name, its own boundary, and its own seat for sixteen years. By 2011 it counted 3,961 people living inside 14.35 square kilometers of coast and scrubland.

Then, in 2013, a nationwide administrative reform erased the line. Olhos de Água was merged back into Albufeira. The new parish was called Albufeira e Olhos de Água. The old name survives as a place people still say out loud. It is a beach. It is a cluster of streets. Everyone still calls it by its old name. It no longer exists as its own jurisdiction. The springs that gave it that name keep rising through the sand. An office in Lisbon decided to call the ground around them something else. The springs rise regardless.

A church roof killed 227 people sheltering from the sea

The parish church of Albufeira had once been a mosque. It was adapted for Christian worship after the town fell to Portuguese forces centuries earlier. On the morning of November 1, 1755, an earthquake tore through the region. A tsunami came over the coast. People ran into the church, thinking its old stone walls would hold. The roof came down on them. Two hundred twenty-seven people died inside a building they had trusted to keep them safe.

The same quake and wave destroyed most of Albufeira itself, a few miles from these springs. Nothing about the springs changed. They kept rising through the sand at low tide. The same water had drawn settlers here for two thousand years. It was indifferent to what had just happened to the people living beside them.

Guerrillas held Albufeira for four years after seizing it

Seventy-eight years later, force came for the town again, this time on foot and by musket. During the Portuguese Liberal Wars, absolutist guerrillas under a commander known as Remexido seized Albufeira. They destroyed buildings and executed inhabitants. Remexido's men held the town for four years before losing it. The coast that Phoenician fishers had once claimed with nets and salting tanks was now claimed with an army.

Roman graves and a villa's mosaics left this ground

Long before either disaster, the dead of this coast were already going into the ground. A burial site called the Necropolis of Morgado da Lameira held remains from the Roman period and earlier. These remained undisturbed for centuries near Albufeira. Archaeologists eventually dug them up. The bones and grave goods now sit in the Albufeira Municipal Archaeological Museum. They are filed and labeled. They are no longer in the earth that had held them since antiquity.

A Roman household built a home on the same principle a short way inland. At Villa Romana da Retorta, workers left behind mosaics and ceramics. These were evidence of a family that lived off this coast's water and fish. The Phoenicians who came before them lived the same way. The villa sat roughly a mile and a half northeast of the springs. It stood on ground that answered to the same tides and the same trade.