Praça da Batalha, Porto

Praça da Batalha is one of Porto’s historic public squares, with a name tied to a much older conflict. Local tradition connects “Batalha,” meaning battle, to a tenth-century clash between Al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir’s Moorish forces and Porto’s inhabitants, ending in the city’s defeat and destruction. Look across the square to Batalha Palace, a late eighteenth-century urban residence whose front combines Baroque and Neoclassical ideas.

Its carved family arms recall the Silvas, Guedes, Melos and Pereiras, who once owned it. During the Siege of Porto in 1832, they left the palace; it served several roles, including a hospital for the wounded, and later lost its interior decoration. It now functions as a post office.

The square took its present urban form in 1861, when a monument to King Pedro the Fifth went up before the palace. Teixeira Lopes the elder made the statue, inaugurated in 1866. This has long been a cultural address too: the Royal Theatre of São João began here in 1794, was rebuilt after fire destroyed its first building in 1908, and Cinema Batalha added a Portuguese Art Deco landmark in 1947.