Monte Pocilgais sits almost exactly between two parishes with old names and long memories. To the north lies São Brás de Alportel. To the south lies Moncarapacho. Both appear in the field notebooks of Ataíde d’Oliveira (1842–1915), the Algarve scholar who spent the final decades of the nineteenth century walking village to village, sitting with elderly women and retired priests, and writing down what they still remembered of the beings that inhabited the landscape. His book As Mouras Encantadas e os Encantamentos no Algarve, published in Loulé, is the most important ethnographic record of the invisible map of the eastern Algarve. It documents a world that was already retreating in his time, preserved only by the caution and loyalty of old people who feared both mockery and the cruelty of careless disclosure.
What follows draws on what Oliveira found in both parishes, and on what we are beginning to find at the oval stone formation that lies between them.
São Brás de Alportel: The Moura at the Bottom of the Spring
In the parish of São Brás de Alportel there is a spring called the Fonte do Mouro, the Spring of the Mouro. The name is older than the town. Oliveira was directed to it by an old woman of Loulé who still carried the story in living memory, learned from her mother, who had learned from hers.
At the bottom of the spring, she said, there is a palace. In the palace lives a moura of great wealth, lying beside a golden bed. Around the bed stand twelve baskets of diamonds and precious stones. She has been there a very long time. She is there still.
Oliveira noted that the people of the parish were reluctant to speak of such things. He attributed their reluctance to two causes: the fear of appearing ridiculous in an age that dismissed everything ancient, and, more remarkably, the fear of causing distress to the enchanted ones themselves by revealing their misfortunes carelessly. The moura at the bottom of the spring was not a character in a story. She was a real presence whose feelings warranted consideration. To expose her sorrow to strangers who might mock it was understood as a form of cruelty.
That second reason tells us everything. This was not superstition. It was courtesy extended across the boundary between worlds.
Moncarapacho: The Mourinho at the River, and the Moura Who Offers Everything
The Moncarapacho section of Oliveira’s notebooks is among the richest in the entire book. Though he notes that no single complete legend survives in the parish, what remains is a dense scatter of encounters, sightings, and local traditions that together constitute a vivid portrait of a landscape understood to be thoroughly inhabited by non-human presences.
Not far from Moncarapacho there is a river pool called the Bum-hum. Laundry women of the village used to go there to wash. Many years before Oliveira’s visit, a woman named Maria da Graça went to the pool and, after washing several garments, found a child sitting on her clean laundry. The child was dressed entirely in red, with a red cap. When she threatened him, he began to spit on the clean clothes. Furious, she chased him. He ran with extraordinary speed and vanished at a certain point without trace. When she returned to her laundry, she found gold coins where the child had spat. The enchanted little mouro had repaid her trouble in his own manner.
On another occasion a woman named Clara passed near the same pool and saw the same child, or one very like him, calling to her from the bank. It was already growing dark. She ran back to the village without stopping.
In other places across the parish, at various times, a graceful moura dressed in white had been seen. On the Serro de São Miguel near the village, enchanted mourinhos had been observed by multiple witnesses. The elderly people of Moncarapacho, Oliveira noted, knew many more stories than they were willing to tell. They shared them only with those they trusted, protecting the tradition from the mockery of the modern age.
But the most extraordinary story Oliveira records from Moncarapacho concerns the Serro da Cabeça, the long ridge that begins east of the village at a place called Monte do Thesouro, the Hill of the Treasure, and ends to the west at a place called the Jordana. The ridge is five kilometres long and nearly three wide. According to a legend whose origins reach back many centuries, any person who walks three circuits of this ridge at midnight will be met by a beautiful moura who will offer all her riches, stored in the Monte do Thesouro, as a reward for having broken her enchantment through those three nocturnal rounds.
No one had ever done it. The fear of walking at night through terrain so densely populated with mouros was stronger than the promised reward. When the neighbours were challenged on this, their answer was precise: you can work your whole life for wealth, they said, but you would not spend a single minute at that price if it meant losing your soul.
That answer is worth sitting with. The treasure was real to them. The moura was real. And the soul was something that could be genuinely endangered by an encounter conducted without the proper preparation, the proper intention, the proper inner state. This was not metaphor. It was a description of the risks of approaching a threshold unprepared.
The Oval Between the Two Hills
Monte Pocilgais stands in the valley between these two parishes, between the Fonte do Mouro to the north and the Serro da Cabeça to the south. The grey stone oval on its south-facing slope sits in a landscape that Oliveira’s informants would have understood immediately: a formation of stones materially foreign to the local geology, oriented on an east-west axis, bounded, enclosed, with a possible passage and old trees rooted deep into its structure, close to a seasonal river, on a hillside that has been perceived as inhabited and oriented since the Neolithic.
The mouros and mouras that Oliveira’s informants described were not confined to famous sites or notable ruins. They were everywhere: in river pools, on hillside ridges, in caverns, at springs, at the edges of fields, in the hollow of certain stones. The landscape was understood as a continuous field of presence, with particular intensification at certain places, the places where the boundary between the visible world and the world adjacent to it grew thin enough for contact to occur.
The Pocilgais oval is precisely such a place. Nearly every person who has sat quietly within it has reported a shift in atmosphere, a gathering of attention, a quality of presence that resists ordinary explanation. Oliveira’s informants would not have found this surprising. They would have nodded. They would have lowered their voices. They might have warned you about the proper way to approach, the proper state of mind to bring, the proper way to leave. They would not have mocked you for noticing.
What the Tradition Knew
The Moura Encantada and the mourinho, her smaller, quicker, more mischievous counterpart, are not romantic inventions of a pre-scientific age. They are descriptions of presences perceived at specific places by specific people across many generations, documented with enough consistency that Oliveira could map them parish by parish across the entire eastern Algarve. The child in red at the Bum-hum was seen by more than one person. The moura in white on the Serro de São Miguel was seen by multiple witnesses. The old people of Moncarapacho knew more than they said, and what they said they only said carefully.
What they were describing, in the vocabulary available to them, was what we now call the ultra-subjective hyperspace, the USH: the interior phenomenal space in which presences, perceptions, and encounters with non-human intelligences take form. The USH is not a metaphor for the unconscious. It is the structural locus of everything the Moura tradition was mapping. The spring does not contain a physical palace. It opens, for those with the right quality of attention, a space in which a palace and its inhabitant become perceptible. The river pool does not harbour a physical child in a red cap. It opens, under the right conditions, an encounter with a being who belongs to the register of reality that the tradition has always called the enchanted world.
The stone is the key. The USH is the door. And the landscape between São Brás de Alportel and Moncarapacho, the landscape in which Monte Pocilgais stands, has been understood as a place of keys for a very long time.
The moura at the bottom of the Fonte do Mouro has been waiting beside her golden bed. The mourinho at the Bum-hum has been conducting his transactions in gold. The beautiful moura of the Serro da Cabeça has been standing at midnight at the Monte do Thesouro, ready to offer everything to whoever arrives with the right kind of courage.
We are not the first people to sit among these stones and feel that something is present. We are simply the latest in a very long line.
After the foundation paper is this the third part of 4 articles on genius loci-based ecological landscape practice
This piece is part of the ongoing series New Landscape Holistic Project: The Magick Megalithic Circle Phenomenology, documenting the esoteric landscape practice developing around the stone oval at Monte Pocilgais, Quinta Quixote Meditation Centre, eastern Algarve.
Primary source: Oliveira, A. d’ (1905). As Mouras Encantadas e os Encantamentos no Algarve. Loulé. Digitised by Internet Archive, 2009.
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