The history of Loures
Loures gathers traces from ice age hunting camps to a Roman villa struck by a road crew in 1990. Named in a document of 1118, held later by Templar lands, shaken by the 1755 earthquake, and marked today by finds at the Municipal Museum of Loures.
In Loures, Portugal, workers cutting an access road to a supermarket in 1990 struck the buried remains of the Roman villa of Almoinhas, occupied from the first to the fifth century AD. Later excavation, formalised in 2006, revealed a necropolis, drainage channels, salting tanks, and a residential quarter, with finds now held at the Municipal Museum of Loures.
Workers building a supermarket road struck a buried Roman villa
Workers cutting a new access road to a LIDL supermarket in Loures (parish) hit something in the ground in 1990. It was not rubble. It was the first stone of a Roman villa of Almoinhas, sealed under the fields for close to two thousand years.
The find sat quietly for five years before anyone dug it properly. In 1995, archaeologists opened the site and found burial tombs, walls, salting tanks, and a dump pit sunk into a gully. They also pulled out a stone capital, a scatter of Roman coins, and ceramic tiles packed inside a broken amphora. Those finds went into the Municipal Museum of Loures, where they still sit on display.
Archaeologists confirmed a working Roman settlement with houses and graves
The archaeological firm ERA came back to the site in October 2004 and went deeper. They found a necropolis, drainage channels, and three tanks built around ovens. They found the outline of a residential quarter. In 1995, scattered walls had looked unrelated. Now they showed a working Roman settlement. It had houses, water systems, and its own dead buried close by.
The findings were made official on 30 August 2006, inside the Palace of the Marquesses of Praia and Monforte. Fernando Real, director of Portugal's Instituto Português de Arqueologia, laid out the conclusions to the municipal government. The villa stood about a quarter mile from the center of Loures. It had gone from a construction snag to a confirmed Roman site in sixteen years. All of it was uncovered because someone needed a better road to a supermarket.
Plague refugees climbed to Montemor and built a chapel that held
Long before any road crew found the villa, plague drove people out of Lisbon and up into the hills above Loures. It killed about 80,000 people across the country over five years. Families climbed to Montemor, a village 350 meters up, hoping the height would keep the sickness out. Some carried an image of Our Lady of Health with them and built a chapel around it. By 1604 the plague had passed and Montemor had not lost anyone to it. The chapel stayed. Later generations credited it with keeping the village safe.
A new church rose over a fourth-century temple's ruins
A church went up on this ground once before. It was not built on empty land. King Denis founded the Order of Christ to inherit the property of the Knights Templar after Rome suppressed the order in the early 1300s. In Loures, that meant the Templars' old holdings passed straight into the new order's hands. Their builders put a church directly over the ruins of a temple. That temple had stood there since the 4th century. A Christian cemetery already stood next to it. Stone that had already stood for a thousand years went under new stone raised for a new order.
Loures parish kept losing pieces of itself over centuries
The parish of Loures kept losing pieces of itself long after the Romans and the Templars were gone. Loures (parish) first appears in a document from 1118, and again in 1191. Since then its borders have moved more than once. Póvoa de Santo Adrião split off in the mid-1600s. Caneças was cut away in 1915. Santo António dos Cavaleiros went its own way in 1989. Each split redrew the line around what was left. A road survey once redrew the line straight through a buried Roman villa the same way.
Under the fields, the ovens and tanks of Almoinhas are still there, three feet below where the supermarket traffic runs.
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.