History

The territory of Almodôvar preserves traces of human occupation going back around 5,000 years. From that deep past remain megalithic monuments: dolmens (antas) recorded in the parishes of Santa Clara-a-Nova and Gomes Aires, evidence of organised communities burying their dead in these lands long before any known settlement.

About 2 km from the village, the settlement of Mesas do Castelinho was founded at the end of the 5th century BC, in the Iron Age, as a walled village set on a natural route of people and goods, between the plain and the hills.

The site remained continuously occupied until the early 2nd century AD. When the Romans laid out the region's new road network, they left the settlement off it, and it was eventually abandoned. Archaeologists Amílcar Guerra and Carlos Fabião describe it as an example of "failed urbanism" in southern Lusitania: a carefully planned town that never became a true Roman city.

After some 700 years of abandonment, the top of the Mesas was occupied again: an Umayyad rural fortification stood on the site between the 9th century and the 11th to 12th centuries. That little castle is where the name "Castelinho" comes from. The Islamic presence also survives in the region's place names, starting with Almodôvar itself.

The name Almodôvar comes from the Arabic al-Mudawwar, "the round one". After the territory became part of the Kingdom of Portugal, King Dinis granted Almodôvar its charter on 17 April 1285, raising the settlement to a municipality. In 1297 the territory was donated to the Order of Santiago, which by the end of the 13th century controlled almost all of Baixo Alentejo.

For centuries, life in the parish revolved around the land: dryland cereals, livestock, and cork harvested from the cork-oak montado. The region also had a strong tradition of crafts, above all shoemaking: about 50 years ago there were close to 60 shoemakers in the region, and it was in Almodôvar that the first National Shoemakers' Union was founded, in 1942.

The 20th century brought emigration, to the cities and abroad, and with it a population decline that still marks the parish. In the 21st century, the village gained a new point of pride: the Manuel Vicente Guerreiro Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum, opened in 2015, which holds part of the finds from Mesas do Castelinho alongside memories of rural life.

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. Santa Clara-a-Nova is once again a parish with its own administrative identity.