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Conventual Wall. Woods of the Seven Hills

The conventual Wall is a vast rural area known since the beginning of the Templar settlement era as Place of the Seven Hills. It is a landscape unit made up a thick, small but steep mountainous area with a small but deep valley descending from east to west in the direction of the Nabão river. In 1160, the Knights Templar founded Tomar´s castle at the hilltop which limits the north and the massif.
When King John III built the new convent - to be used by the reformed Order of Christ - he surrounded the whole rural area with a wall around the hill brow connecting the entire Seven Hills place to the convent. This rural domain now became the private fence for the friars of Christ.
Fernão Álvares do Oriente celebrated the conventual fence in the 16th century in his pastoral novel Lusitânia Transformada: "...Close to old Nabão Riverside - which the inhabitants called the Seven Hills due to the fact that indeed seven hills surrounded everything - there is such a hidden forest that the shepherds neither saw it nor even thought of entering it.".

 

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