São Bartolomeu de Messines

About This Place

A working inland town in the Silves municipality with a remarkable red-sandstone Manueline church, a mainline railway station, and Via Algarviana Sectors 8 and 9 meeting at its door.

São Bartolomeu de Messines — usually just "Messines" — is a town of around five thousand people in the Silves municipality, set in the low hills where the barrocal meets the coastal plain. It is not a tourist town and makes no attempt to be one. It is a place where people live and work, which for a walker coming off the serra is exactly what is wanted.

The church

The Igreja Matriz is the reason to stop. Built in the sixteenth century in local red sandstone, it has a Manueline portal and, inside, six twisted columns carved from the same stone, spiralling like rope. It is one of the better examples of the style in the Algarve interior and it is almost always empty.

The town also produced the poet João de Deus, whose nineteenth-century primer taught generations of Portuguese children to read. There is a small museum in his honour.

If the Manueline work here interests you, Silves is twenty minutes down the road and has the cathedral and the castle to match — the two are best seen on the same day.

Barragem do Arade

Six kilometres southwest, the Arade reservoir offers swimming, birdwatching and quiet shoreline walking. It is a reasonable half-day diversion for anyone with a rest day here. Downstream, the Arade becomes navigable, and the run down to Silves by boat is one of the more relaxing ways to spend an afternoon off the trail.

For walkers and cyclists

Messines is the end of Sector 8 of the Via Algarviana — 20.6 km from Alte, with 556 m of ascent and 641 m of descent, graded III — Reasonably Hard.

It is also the start of Sector 9 to Silves, a serious 29 km day graded V — Very Hard, with 1,369 m of ascent and 1,469 m of descent. Official water notes for Sector 9 flag water at the start and the end only, so fill up before leaving.

The trail starts from the square by the Igreja Matriz, at approximately 37.2568, -8.2862.

Getting there

This is the most useful transport node on the entire eastern half of the Via Algarviana. Messines has a railway station on the Algarve line, with direct trains to Faro, Albufeira, Silves, Portimão and Lagos, which makes it the obvious place to start or finish a section of the trail rather than committing to the full traverse. Note that the station sits about 1.5 km from the town centre. Vamus Algarve buses also serve the town, and there are cafés, banks, a pharmacy and a supermarket — the best resupply between Alcoutim and Silves.