Now it is known as ‘Castelo de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o do Arade’, but almost 400 years ago it was built as ‘Forte de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o Baptista’. Named after the prophet John the Baptist. Together with ‘Forte de Santa Catarina’ on the side of Portim\u00e3o, the fortress in Ferragudo protected the mouth of the Arade River. This is a small history of the iconic building in Ferragudo, which is described in more detail in the following stories: ‘The Dutch fool and the dissolute captain’, ‘The devastating tsunami of 1755’, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte in Ferragudo’ and ‘The inhabitants of the castle’.<\/p>\n
Before the fortress was built in 1644, there was a watchtower on this spot. In 1918, the first inhabitant of the castle, Joachim Jos\u00e9 Coelho de Carvalho wrote: “On the spot where the fortress is located, King Jo\u00e3o II ordered the erection of an observation tower after the bay had been attacked by Algerian pirates”. This must have been between 1481 and 1495, when Jo\u00e3o II was King. The tower was still there in 1584, when the Dutch skipper Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer made a detailed map of the estuary of the Arade River , showing a turret on the site of the current castle. <\/p>\n
Forte de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o Baptista was one of the first defences built after the sixty years of Spanish rule, when the Spanish king was also king of Portugal from 1580 to 1640. It turned out that Forte de Santa Catharina on the side of Portim\u00e3o was not enough to protect the Arade river. After all, the main channel was on the side of Ferragudo. After the Spanish governor of Portugal was expelled from the country in 1640, Portugal went to war with Spain and the construction of the new fort at Ferragudo requested urgency.<\/p>\n
Francisco da Costa Barros, the first commander of Forte de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o Baptista in 1644, had been there for less than a year when a scandal broke out in Ferragudo about his dissolute lifestyle. The friars of the S\u00e3o Francisco monastery complained about this to the king, who ordered the commander to come to Lisbon and had to make a decision about the commander’s future. <\/p>\n
The fort suffered a great deal from flying storms and colossal waves that plagued it. But never was the violence of nature more intense than the earthquake and tsunami on Saturday morning, 1 November 1755, All Saints’ Day. The earthquake off the coast of the Algarve had a magnitude of 8.5 on the Richter scale and the tsunami that landed in the Algarve half an hour later pushed the water here to almost 11 metres high.<\/p>\n
In 1807, Portugal was captured by the troops of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Houses were taken over by French soldiers and the population was financially stripped down with towering taxes. Opposition was cruelly met with murder and manslaughter. The Portuguese commander of the fort refused to function under the French, after which the fort was taken and the French flag flied at the top. A year later, the population of the Algarve revolted, and the inhabitants of Ferragudo “drunk of wine and beer” also asserted themselves.
\nAfter it was decommissioned in 1861, the fort remained empty for almost 30 years, until in 1892 the famous scientist, diplomat and writer Joaquim Jose Coelho de Carvalho transformed the dilapidated fort into the habitable Castelo de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o do Arade. He was a fervent opponent of the authoritarian regime that was in power after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1910. He could never have anticipated that after his death the Minister of Colonies, Francisco Vieira Machado, became the new owner of the castle. Immediately after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 and with it the fall of the authoritarian regime, the castle was classified as a national monument and Ferragudo tried (unsuccessfully) to turn the castle into a public cultural centre. Since 1998, the monumental Castelo de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o do Arade has been owned by the Portuguese businessman Vasco Pereira Coutinho, who lives there frequently with his family to this day.
\nThe seemingly peaceful Ferragudo and the idyllic Castelo de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o do Arade have a turbulent history that will be explained in the following stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now it is known as ‘Castelo de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o do Arade’, but almost 400 years ago it was built as ‘Forte de S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o Baptista’. Named after the prophet John the Baptist. Together with ‘Forte de Santa Catarina’ on the side of Portim\u00e3o, the fortress in Ferragudo protected the mouth of the Arade River. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":14730,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[518],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-orte-in-ferragudo"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brighthomesalgarve.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}