The abandoned village of Safira is located near Montemor-o-Novo, in the Alentejo. The village is composed of a few ruined houses, a church and, on the South bank of the Safira Creek, a cemetery.
The Church was built on the 15th century when Cardinal Prince D. Afonso was the bishop and it was enlarged in the 16th century. It was damaged by the 1755 earthquake and restored in 1874 and 1903. It brings tears to the eyes to see places as beautiful as these abandoned and nearly destroyed.

Is it worth a visit?

We spend here an entire afternoon just enjoying the nature on a perfect spring day and we cannot believe anyone would leave such a beautiful place. It was a very windy day so we tried our small kite and had a lot of fun with it, I think even more than our son.

A litle bit of history

Safira was once a thriving village that even got to be a parish but then people started to leave in the mid-1930’s searching for better living conditions and now it’s nothing more than an abandoned pile of rocks and debris. Many years after the last person left this place is a reminder that things are but a moment in time and everything eventually fades away, on the bright side it’s also beautiful to look at nature taking over what was once ruled by man.
It’s very hard to know exactly what happened to this place as there are not many documents about it but we do know that the church was built in the 15th century and that in the village there was a factory and two mines one of arsenic and one of copper.

How to get there.

To get there you should follow the EN4 sign to Safira between Montemor-o-Novo and Silveiras and continue on that road until it turns into a dirt road.

Or just follow this link for google maps:
https://goo.gl/maps/5VVdT8BfCxJ2