Curiosities
True stories, old legends and little-known facts about Santa Clara-a-Nova and the Almodôvar municipality. Every answer rests on historical, archaeological or official sources.
Did you know...?
Why is the village called Santa Clara-a-Nova?
The village and its parish are dedicated to Saint Clare of Assisi (Santa Clara de Assis), founder of the Poor Clares. Her cult spread through Portugal via Poor Clare convents founded between the 13th and 17th centuries, in places like Coimbra, Santarém and Vila do Conde. The "a-Nova" (the New) distinguishes the village from Santa Clara-a-Velha (the Old), in the neighbouring municipality of Odemira, whose church is dedicated to the same saint.
What links the village's patron saint to television?
Saint Clare of Assisi is the official patron saint of television. Pope Pius XII proclaimed her so on 14 February 1958, based on the account that a year before her death, too ill to leave her cell, Clare watched Mass projected on the wall of her room. A website dedicated to Santa Clara-a-Nova is in good company.
Why is the village feast held on 12 August?
In the current liturgical calendar, Saint Clare's feast day is 11 August, the day she died in 1253. Before the 1970 reform, however, it was celebrated on 12 August, and the village feast preserves that older date. Local tradition kept the calendar the Church itself later changed.
What is the "failed Roman town" next to the village?
Archaeologists Amílcar Guerra and Carlos Fabião describe Mesas do Castelinho as an example of "failed urbanism" in southern Roman Lusitania: a settlement with a careful Roman Republican orthogonal plan that never became a true Roman town. When the new Roman road network was laid out, it bypassed the settlement, which was abandoned in the early 2nd century AD. A 2,000-year-old lesson about what happens when you are left off the map.
How much of the archaeological site has been excavated?
About 10%, on Carlos Fabião's own estimate quoted in the press; the director's figure, not a published measurement. Excavation ran between 1988 and 2018 across eight sectors, and most of Mesas do Castelinho is still literally underground.
What did people eat at Mesas do Castelinho over 2,000 years ago?
Barley above all: it is the most ubiquitous crop in every phase of the settlement, on soils already impoverished by the 4th century BC, in a landscape dominated by rockrose scrub with stands of holm and cork oak. Meat too: deer turns up across all anatomical parts, a sign it was processed on site, and cattle contributed most to the diet. There are also ninety fig seeds in a pit from the start of the Republican occupation, but the authors read those as a deposit that "porventura", perhaps, marked the inauguration of that space, rather than as a meal.
Who is the Lizard-Man?
According to the legend recorded by the Almodôvar municipality, an old woman was invited into an enchanted house full of riches at Monte Novo do Castelinho, guarded by a creature half man, half lizard, on the condition that she never invoke God's name. When she made the sign of the cross, everything vanished. Tradition says the Lizard-Man still guards the site today, hidden even from the archaeologists.
Did the treasure legend really cause the destruction of 1986?
In late 1986, part of the Mesas do Castelinho ruins was destroyed with heavy machinery. According to the Almodôvar municipality, those responsible were hunting for the treasures of the Lizard-Man legend. That destruction triggered emergency excavations and, from 1988-1989, the systematic research project that revealed the site's importance. The legend accidentally launched the monument's scientific career.
What is the script no one can read?
The Southwest Script (Escrita do Sudoeste), found on stelae in the Almodôvar municipality, is considered the oldest writing system in the Iberian Peninsula and remains undeciphered. At Mesas do Castelinho, a stela bearing this script was spotted in 2007 and lifted in September 2008, reused face down in a fill beneath a Roman Republican street, some three centuries older than the surface it lay in. The Museum of the Southwest Script (MESA) in Almodôvar is the reference museum for this mysterious writing.
What is the terracotta head they call "Batata"?
A small terracotta human head found in 1995 in Sector A1 at Mesas do Castelinho, in secondary position in an Iron Age context. It has realistic features and is possibly a child; the excavation team calls it "Batata", Potato. The only archaeologist to publish on it reads it as "a toy, or even a decorative object", not as a divinity or an ex-voto. The "cultural synthesis" reading of Mediterranean and Celtic traits that circulates in popular material has no support in archaeological publication.
Where does the Miners' Hymn sung at Neves-Corvo come from?
The hymn sung by the mining communities of Baixo Alentejo originates in the Asturian song "Nel Pozu María Luisa" (also known as "Santa Bárbara bendita"), which mourns a fatal accident in an Asturian coal mine. The miners of Aljustrel adapted it into Portuguese, and the tradition reached Neves-Corvo, where it is still sung on the miners' vigil day. Local memory also circulates a version claiming the melody is Chilean, and that dispute has become part of the song's own story.
Did the parish disappear and come back?
Yes. In 2013, a national administrative reform merged Santa Clara-a-Nova with Gomes Aires into a single union of parishes. Law 25-A/2025 of 13 March restored the two separate parishes, effective from the swearing-in of the officials elected in the October 2025 local elections. Twelve years later, Santa Clara-a-Nova is a parish of its own again.