Cerro da Vila Museum

A visit to the archaeological site and to the Cerro da Vila Museum is an incursion 5000 years into the history of humanity.

The route through the ruins offers an immersive experience through a typical Roman seaside villa, with port and harbour facilities, and which had continuous occupation until the time of the Islamic presence (11th century), when it became an important rural settlement. Some buildings were then reused in the Islamic period, such as the factory for the production of fish preparations, which compartments were separated by walls of rammed earth and converted into housing units, where traces of rectangular domestic dwellings with an inner courtyard, silos and oven can still be seen today.

The museum exhibits the objects collected during the excavations, with an area dedicated to Islamic artefacts, where we find an abundant and diverse set of ceramic materials from this period.

In fact, the Cerro da Vila is an emblematic site for Islamic archaeology in Portugal, as here, for the first time, a systematic study of a collection of Islamic ceramics was carried out, consisting mainly of cooking utensils and candlesticks, with luxurious pieces in "green and manganese" and in "dry rope", which clearly attest to the uniqueness of the ceramics of Al Andaluz.