Elvas sits ten kilometres from Spain, and it has the stonework to prove it. For centuries this small hilltop city in the Alentejo was Portugal's main defensive gate against its larger neighbour, the fortified town that faced Badajoz across the plain. The result is the largest system of bulwarked dry-ditch fortifications in the world, according to UNESCO, which listed it in 2012. The walls are in the star-shaped style that arrived in the seventeenth century, with sharp angled bastions, deep dry moats and protected paths, designed to withstand cannon. Two big forts stand on hills outside, a smaller one on another, and an aqueduct comes into town on gigantic arches.
The history is a record of wars between the two kingdoms. When Portugal broke away from Spain in 1640, Elvas became the front line for twenty-eight years of war, and in January 1659 a Spanish army besieged it. The Portuguese garrison, helped by the townspeople, sallied out and destroyed the Spanish lines, a victory remembered as the Battle of the Lines of Elvas. Later, in the Peninsular War, the Duke of Wellington used the town as a base.
You ride in through the walls, and the experience is half the pleasure: you pass under heavy gates, through narrow streets of whitewashed houses with wrought-iron balconies, to a central square paved with the black and white patterns of Portuguese calcada. Storks nest on chimneys and towers. Fuel and food are easy in this town of about ten thousand, and parking is best done outside the walls and followed by a walk.
The Alentejo is a country of cork oaks, olive groves, wheat fields and slow undulating plains that turn gold and parched by July, when temperatures routinely pass forty degrees. For riders, the main roads, including the A6 motorway and the older N4 from Lisbon, are smooth and fast, and the minor roads are quiet, with long views. Early spring brings wildflowers, and autumn brings mild days.
Elvas is famous for its plums, ameixas de Elvas, preserved in sugar syrup, and for sericaia, a baked pudding of egg and cinnamon served with plums. It would be rude to leave without trying both. Come in April, May or October for comfortable temperatures.