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The headland
The fortress closes the only way onto a rocky promontory
The fortress stands on a steep promontory east of Cape St. Vincent, about 1 km long, 300 m wide and 40 m high. Its walls cut across the headland, so there is no access except through the castle.
Sacred ground
The headland was called the Sacred Promontory long before the fortress
The Greek historian Ephorus of Cyme, in the 4th century B.C., called it Hieron Akroterion. Pliny the Elder translated the name into Latin as Promontorium Sacrum. It was also the alleged burial place of St. Vincent.
Henry
Infante Henry was given the cape in 1443 and built a village there
The Crown granted the territory of Cape St. Vincent to Infante Henry for life in October 1443. A 1434 document had called the region a lonely and deserted place. Henry called his settlement the Vila do Infante.
“...lonely and deserted place, far from villages”
A 1434 document of Edward of Portugal, on the cape
The school
The Sagres school of navigation is probably a myth
Tradition says Henry founded a navigation school at Sagres. Yet the Village of the Infante did not start functioning until around 1446, after Gil Eanes had passed Cape Bojador. Lagos was the real center of sailings in Henry's time.
Drake
Francis Drake sacked the village in 1587 and destroyed much of the fortress
In 1587 the English privateer Francis Drake raided the Algarve coast. The English drew the fortress before the sacking, giving probably the oldest visual evidence of it. After the 1755 Lisbon earthquake it was rebuilt in the late 18th century.
Day 3, morning
Next is Praia da Mareta.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Fortress of Sagres, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.