Batalha Square ( pt, Praça da Batalha) is a historical public square located in the city of

Porto Porto or Oporto () is the second-largest city in Portugal, the capital of the Porto District, and one of the Iberian Peninsula's major urban areas. Porto city proper, which is the entire municipality of Porto, is small compared to its metropo ...

, in

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, In recognized minority languages of Portugal: :* mwl, República Pertuesa is a country located on the Iberian Peninsula, in Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Macaronesian ...

Origin of the name

According to tradition, the name ''batalha'' (battle) comes from a 10th-century battle fought between the

Moorish The term Moor, derived from the ancient Mauri, is an exonym first used by Christian Europeans to designate the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily and Malta during the Middle Ages. Moors are not a distinct or ...

forces of

Al-Mansur Ibn Abi Aamir Abu ʿĀmir Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn Abi ʿĀmir al-Maʿafiri ( ar, أبو عامر محمد بن عبد الله بن أبي عامر المعافري), nicknamed al-Manṣūr ( ar, المنصور, "the Victorious"), which is often Latiniz ...

and the inhabitants of Porto, which resulted in the defeat of the latter and the destruction of the city.

Overview

An important monument of the square is the Batalha Palace, a good example of a late 18th-century urban palace of Porto. The main façade, in a style intermediate between baroque and neoclassical, carries the

coat-of-arms A coat of arms is a heraldic visual design on an escutcheon (i.e., shield), surcoat, or tabard (the latter two being outer garments). The coat of arms on an escutcheon forms the central element of the full heraldic achievement, which in i ...

of the former owners (Silvas, Guedes, Melos e Pereiras). During the

Siege of Porto The siege of Porto is considered the period between July 1832 and August 1833 in which the troops of Dom Pedro remained besieged by the forces of Dom Miguel I of Portugal. The resistance of the city of Porto and the troops of Dom Pedro made ...

(1832) the owners left the building and it was used for several purposes, including blood hospital. The interior has been stripped of its decoration still in the 19th century. Nowadays it is used as post office. The square was urbanised in 1861, when a statue of King

Pedro V of Portugal , house = Braganza , house-type = House , father = Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry , mother = Queen Maria II of Portugal , birth_date = , birth_place = , death_date = , death_place = Necessida ...

, standing over a

pedestal A pedestal (from French ''piédestal'', Italian ''piedistallo'' 'foot of a stall') or plinth is a support at the bottom of a statue, vase, column, or certain altars. Smaller pedestals, especially if round in shape, may be called socles. In c ...

, was erected right in front of Batalha Palace. The statue is a work by sculptor Teixeira Lopes (father) which was inaugurated in 1866. The Batalha area has been an important cultural spot for centuries. In 1794, it was here that the Oporto's opera house, the Royal Theatre of São João, was built. The theatre still exists, although the original building had to be replaced in 1908 following a fire. Another important cultural venue of the square is the Cinema Batalha, a landmark of Portuguese

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...

architecture dating from 1947. Batalha Square was an important traffic hub until recently, but since the 1980s it has been mostly

pedestrianised Pedestrian zones (also known as auto-free zones and car-free zones, as pedestrian precincts in British English, and as pedestrian malls in the United States and Australia) are areas of a city or town reserved for pedestrian-only use and in whi ...

. The square is also a touristic spot thanks to its monuments,

café A coffeehouse, coffee shop, or café is an establishment that primarily serves coffee of various types, notably espresso, latte, and cappuccino. Some coffeehouses may serve cold drinks, such as iced coffee and iced tea, as well as other non-ca ...

s and hotels.

References

{{Porto Squares in Porto

Origin of the name

Overview

See also

References