Open ground on Portugal's Lisbon coast
Alcabideche, a parish just inland from Cascais on Portugal's Lisbon coast, carries traces of farming reaching back to the Copper Age, with Roman villas, a Visigothic cemetery and Iron Age burial grounds all recorded within two kilometres. By 2011 the parish held more than 42,000 people, its old farmland largely built over.
Farmers worked this ground thousands of years before Cascais
You're standing in open ground on the edge of Alcabideche, a parish just inland from Cascais.
But people have worked this land a long time. A quarter mile off, surveyors logged surface traces at Monte das Tojas, unidentified in age but clearly old. Less than half a mile away, a Copper Age object turned up at Alcabideche Poente, a stray sign of farmers here thousands of years before Cascais existed at all.
Iron Age and Roman layers lie beneath a later church
Half a mile away, older ground shows at the Igreja de São Vicente de Alcabideche. Digs there turned up traces from the Iron Age and from Roman times, long before any church stood on the spot. People farmed and settled this coastline for centuries before Rome ever reached Portugal, and this parish kept drawing new layers of use on top of the old ones.
A crowded parish of 42,000 replaced small farmed plots
By 2011, Alcabideche had grown into a crowded parish of more than 42,000 people, part of the municipality of Cascais. That number covers the whole parish, not this patch of ground, but it marks how much busier this land became. Where farmers once worked small plots and left behind the odd stray tool, houses and roads now cover most of it.
You stand on quiet ground between scattered houses, with older traces of farming and settlement recorded nearby.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.