Travessa de Dona Brites

The Travessa de Dona Brites, a narrow lane in the old town between the castle and the Misericórdia church, contains some of the finest surviving medieval domestic architecture in the Algarve. Several houses along the lane retain their original fifteenth-century Gothic windows and portals — carved limestone frames of simple but elegant design that predates most of what survived the 1755 earthquake elsewhere in the region.

The lane is easy to miss but worth finding: from the castle gates, walk downhill toward the Misericórdia and look for the narrow turning on the right. The architectural quality is higher than most of the town's more visited sights.

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A story
The Gothic windows along Travessa de Dona Brites are the most visible evidence that Tavira was a prosperous fifteenth-century town. Gothic stonework of this quality was expensive and required craftsmen brought in from Lisbon or the north. The merchant families who commissioned it were the same families whose ships were loading tuna and cork for the Mediterranean trade. Most of the houses have been modified repeatedly since then, but the windows survived because replacing carved stonework was more expensive than leaving it in place.

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