Before Castles: Discovering Portugal’s Colossal Chalcolithic Stronghold

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:01]These walls may look like a typical rural  wall here in Portugal, but they’re different.

[00:00:08]These walls surrounding a very large  enclosure date back to prehistoric times.

[00:00:17]This is the Chalcolithic “castro”  de Vila Nova de São Pedro.

[00:00:23]Let’s explore!

[00:00:38]The “castro” or hillfort of Vila Nova de  São Pedro is NEAR Santarém in the district of Lisboa! [My dumb mistake. Sorry!!]

[00:00:46]It’s outside the town of Vila Nova de  São Pedro, from which it gets its name.

[00:00:53]It’s located on a hilltop  to the north of the town.

[00:00:59]The people in Vila Nova de São Pedro  are proud of their famous castro, and there are signs directing you to it.

[00:01:10]“Castro” is the Portuguese word for  a settlement, usually on a hilltop, that is surrounded and protected by walls.

[00:01:19]I’m going to use the term “castro” in this  video because it’s a good, short term.

[00:01:24]But it also might cause some confusion.

[00:01:27]There is a huge and famous “castro culture”  here in Portugal, located in the far north.

[00:01:35]That culture existed during the Iron  Age, in the final millennium BC.

[00:01:41]The Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro, along with others here in the Estremadura  region of central Portugal, is much older.

[00:01:51]These castros date back to  the Chalcolithic period, two thousand years before the  northern “castro culture.”

[00:02:01]When you reach the site, there’s an information board in both Portuguese and English.

[00:02:08]Walking up to the castro,  you can see that it’s big, but it’s really a jumble of stones and  grassy slopes, with a few visible walls.

[00:02:23]It’s kind of hard to see what’s so  special about it …until you get inside.

[00:02:44]When you arrive at the castro and walk in,  it’s a huge site. It’s very impressive, but without understanding the details  it’s hard to put it into context.

[00:03:00]When I came on a visit with an archaeological  team, the amount of information was immense.

[00:03:05]This is a fascinating place that has been investigated for years, and  is still being investigated.

[00:03:12]I will try to give you a short explanation.

[00:03:17]This central area here in the middle is called the first line of walls, but  they’re not necessarily the oldest.

[00:03:26]There’s a lot of things that they  don’t quite know all about this site: they’re still figuring it out.

[00:03:33]Was this castro built from the centre out or  from the outside in? It’s a little unclear.

[00:03:39]What they do figure is that  this central area – the redoubt, the central enclosure for this castro  – was the final line of defence.

[00:03:47]What it typically was used for was for storage.

[00:03:51]There’s a small hole here that was used for grain.

[00:03:57]There’s a cistern at the side here, that was used for water and beside  it was an oven for baking clay.

[00:04:05]They figure these stone walls  would have been faced with clay to make them smooth and appear nice.

[00:04:14]There is a large hole in the middle that  they’ve identified as a dwelling place, but this generally wasn’t a city.

[00:04:23]They figure this was a kind of granary  or a storehouse, a barn in the centre, to keep all the materials that people  might need if they were being attacked.

[00:04:37]The walls were built to provide defence, and the  sheer size of them shows their effectiveness.

[00:04:43]But they also stop the visitor from appreciating  the proper position of this fortified settlement.

[00:04:54]If you come to visit this place on your  own, it’s tempting when you see these gentle grass slopes that lead up to the top of  the walls to climb up there and enjoy the view.

[00:05:04]But there is a sign at the front saying  “please stay off the walls.”

[00:05:08]Please do.

[00:05:10]Because if you climb up on  these walls you could be damaging this very important archaeological site.

[00:05:17]So please: keep your feet on the ground and enjoy  the aerial views of this site from this video.

[00:05:25]From the air, the countryside looks  almost the same as it would have  been five thousand years ago  when this castro was built.

[00:05:33]The stream in the valley  below, the Ribeira da Maçussa, would have been much fuller and more navigable,  but otherwise a rich and verdant landscape.

[00:05:43]Peaceful and green.

[00:05:47]But it wasn’t peaceful. The people who lived  here had to defend themselves from outsiders.

[00:05:53]They built enormous fortified  walls around their community and, more importantly, around  their precious commodities.

[00:06:07]This castro, and others like it, were built to protect both the people in  the community as well as their wealth.

[00:06:15]During the end of the Neolithic, improved  methods of agriculture, such as using oxen  to plow larger areas, allowed people to produce crops and livestock in abundance.

[00:06:27]They were able to trade with other communities,  obtaining goods like tools, jewelry, and more …including the precious new commodity: metal.

[00:06:41]The Chalcolithic period is  also known as the Copper Age, as this is when people started  developing the ability to create metal.

[00:06:49]No longer limited to just using stone tools, they could produce lighter, sharper,  more versatile tools and weapons.

[00:06:58]The people in this settlement didn’t produce  their own copper, but they obtained copper tools and other artefacts through trade  with other castros that did.

[00:07:08]So the central line of walls protected the  wealth: food, tools, pottery, livestock.

[00:07:16]Most of the people would have lived  outside the walls, close to their farmland.

[00:07:21]They would have come inside the  walls during times of attack, probably inside the outer rings of walls.

[00:07:32]Coming around outside, you can  see the structure of the castro.

[00:07:37]There’s the first line of walls in the centre,  the central line, and then there’s a surrounding  circle of walls that go around it.

[00:07:46]I’m actually standing on it right now.

[00:07:48]And the third circle of walls would have been out beyond that way, and you can see some of the stones out there.

[00:07:55]They haven’t been completely  excavated or completely rebuilt, but archaeologists are still  finding new things at every level.

[00:08:05]The archaeological work done here is  an interesting story in and of itself.

[00:08:11]The site was discovered by archaeologists in 1936, and there was a long campaign of  excavations over the next thirty years.

[00:08:19]This was during the time of economic and social  hardships, including during the Second World War.

[00:08:26]People in the community were hired to help out  with the excavations, and their contributions were valuable to the archaeologists and the  income was incredibly valuable to the community.

[00:08:37]After the site was declared a National Monument  in 1971, a new campaign of excavations was begun by the Portuguese Association of Arqueologists,  and again they have worked with the community.

[00:08:49]There is a commemoration of this collaboration  on the project’s website and YouTube channel.

[00:08:58]At various points outside the walls,  you can really see how tall they are.

[00:09:03]They’re at least 4m, high if not  5m, and they’re extremely thick.

[00:09:08]This was a huge amount of  stone that was worked here, including very large stones that  could have weighed hundreds of kilos.

[00:09:17]The amount of work that it took to create  just the central redoubt here is huge.

[00:09:23]When you think about the three lines of  walls, the amount of work here is enormous.

[00:09:31]The scale of this work shows how  successful the Neolithic revolution was.

[00:09:37]As people formed communities that stayed  put and raised crops and livestock, and improved techniques over generations, their communities grew and were able to  work together on massive construction works.

[00:09:51]They still continued to live in wooden  houses, which haven’t survived until today, and still continued to build megalithic tombs,  the construction of large fortifications showed that many hundreds of people  worked together over long periods of time.

[00:10:08]While this marked an age of increased warfare, it also indicated an age of increased  communal success and cohesion.

[00:10:24]This castro was in use for many many centuries, and many generations of people  lived and worked in this area.

[00:10:34]Not necessarily in the central redoubt, but  in the whole area: farming, hunting, etc. And then it disappeared.

[00:10:45]Why? We don’t really know.

[00:10:48]Did it succumb to its own  complexity: it reached a level of size that couldn’t be supported  by the area any more? Possibly.

[00:10:58]Did climate change have something to  do with that? That’s possible too.

[00:11:03]Was it simply warfare and people were  overwhelmed by opponents? We don’t really know.

[00:11:10]There are lots of questions when we study  prehistory, and sometimes we don’t have answers.

[00:11:17]Or if we have answers, they can only be tentative  based on the data we have and that might be changed when we get new information.

[00:11:28]It is one of the things that makes it  exciting for me to study prehistory.

[00:11:32]I find it fascinating that  some place like this that had life for thousands of years, and  had thousands of people living here: there’s only so much we can know about it  and we can probably never know everything.

[00:11:51]I think I got carried away with some hyperbole.

[00:11:54]The community that would have supported this castro would have been maybe  two or three hundred people.

[00:12:02]The castro shows an occupation of about 800 years, which eventually would have reached  thousands of people… but only in the course of the 40 generations of people living there.

[00:12:16]Walking around you can see places where  there’s active archaeological work going on.

[00:12:20]There’s a lot of work still being done here,  and a lot of new discoveries being found.

[00:12:26]But listening to the archaeologists here, it’s amazing how much they’ve discovered  here and how much is still left unknown.

[00:12:35]Things that they know are  often at the macro level.

[00:12:38]They know about commerce in the area  between this castro and other castros.

[00:12:44]But there’s other things that they don’t  know, like where did they bury their dead?

[00:12:47]They haven’t found any necropolises  or any grave areas here.

[00:12:52]They have seen some funerary ornaments  and elements from graves, but they haven’t found any human remains and they’re not  quite sure where the dead were buried.

[00:13:05]To better understand what the archaeologists  have discovered about the community, it’s very helpful to see the artefacts  that have been found in the castro.

[00:13:14]To do that, we have to travel down to Lisbon,  to the Archaeological Museum of Carmo.

[00:13:19]That’s the home of the Portuguese  Association of Archaeologists, and there’s a special section devoted  to the castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro.

[00:13:29]A large model of the castro shows what it  would have looked like while it was occupied: with smooth clay plaster  covering the rough stone walls.

[00:13:39]The model doesn’t show the second and third rings of walls completely – it only shows sections that have been excavated.

[00:13:47]In a large display case, you can see a big  selection of the artefacts found: stone and copper  tools, ceramic pots and loom weights, beaded necklaces, cylindrical limestone idols, and more.

[00:14:04]With imagination, you can picture some aspects  of life for people who lived in the castro: weaving cloth, cooking,  hunting, and even worshipping.

[00:14:16]I hope you’ve enjoyed this vist to  the Castro de Vila Nova de São Pedro.

[00:14:20]If you want more information, I’ve got a  page on my website, prehistoricportugal.com, with lots more information including links to other sources, including the one that the  archaeologists who are studying it maintain, which has all kinds of information about their work.

[00:14:35]As always, please do give me a like and subscribe.

[00:14:38]I’m going to be visiting lots more prehistoric  sites in the weeks and months to come.

[00:14:42]Thanks for watching!