Faro

Faro lies on the Algarve coast behind the sandbanks of the Ria Formosa lagoon. As Ossonoba it was the leading town of the southwest under Moorish rule, and in the ninth century it was walled as the capital of a short-lived princedom. Afonso III took it in March 1249 and renamed it Santa Maria de Faaron; the Treaty of Badajoz in 1267 then fixed the border with Castile on the Guadiana.

The town had one of the most active Jewish communities in the Algarve, and in the late fifteenth century its press printed a Pentateuch, the first book printed in Portugal. Manuel I's decree of December 1496 ordered the Jews to convert or leave. John III raised Faro to the rank of city in 1540, and in 1577 the see of the Algarve moved here from Silves. In 1596 English troops under the Earl of Essex sacked and burned the city; the fair of Santa Iria is traditionally said to have begun afterwards to help the hungry and plague-struck survivors. The earthquake of 1 November 1755 ruined much of the Algarve.