🇵🇹 Portugal · Algarve
Faro has an image problem: it is the door through which almost everyone enters the Algarve — its airport receives millions of tourists a year heading for the region's beaches — yet many pass straight through. We will be honest: Faro tends to be a place people pass through. And yet anyone who gives it a few hours finds a quiet capital with a beautiful walled old town, a lagoon teeming with life and a few corners well worth the time.
The old town, the Cidade Velha, is entered through the elegant Arco da Vila and holds cobbled lanes, grand houses, the cathedral (Sé) and the municipal museum, set in a Renaissance convent. A few steps away, inside the Igreja do Carmo, waits one of the most striking curiosities in Portugal: the Capela dos Ossos, a small chapel entirely lined with the bones and skulls of more than a thousand friars, a memento mori you don't forget. And surrounding it all is the Ria Formosa, a natural park of sand islands, marshes and channels where you can sail out to almost deserted beaches.
This guide shows you what Faro really has to offer, without the sales pitch: its more than two thousand years of history — from Roman Ossonoba to the last city of the Algarve to be reconquered — its monuments, and above all its natural jewel, the Ria Formosa, with the Deserta and do Farol islands a short boat ride away. We cover what to see, what it costs, how to get around the Algarve without a metro, and how to make the most of Faro, whether as a destination in itself or as a smart base for exploring the eastern Algarve.
Faro has more than two thousand years of history. Its origins go back to a settlement of Phoenician roots and, above all, to the Roman city of Ossonoba, an important centre in Lusitania that minted its own coins and prospered on garum and salted fish. After the fall of Rome came the Germanic peoples and, in 713, the Muslims; under their rule the city was known in the 9th century as Santa Maria Ibn Harun, a name linked to the dynasty that governed the taifa of Santa Maria do al-Gharb. In 1249 the troops of King Afonso III took Faro, the last city in the Algarve to be taken from the Muslims, completing the Reconquest of southern Portugal. In 1540 it was raised to the status of city. In 1596, during the Iberian Union, an English fleet commanded by the Earl of Essex stormed and sacked Faro: it burned churches and carried off the bishop's library, which ended up in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where it remains. The earthquakes of 1722 and, above all, the great earthquake of 1755 caused enormous damage and loss of life in the city. In the 19th century Faro consolidated its role as administrative capital of the Algarve, a status it still holds, reinforced in the 20th century by the airport and the university. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Atlantic south: the most Islamised region of Portugal (al-Gharb), where Henry the Navigator drove the Discoveries from Sagres and Lagos, the city of Europe's first slave market (1444), now turned into the country's great tourist coast.
Read the history of Algarve →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Beneath the quiet capital of the Algarve beats a city more than two and a half thousand years old. Faro's origins go back to the Phoenician colonisation of the western Mediterranean, around the 8th century BC, when those sailors set up trading posts along the southern coast of the Iberian peninsula. From there comes, on the most widely accepted reading, the city's ancient name: Ossonoba, linked to a phrase meaning something like 'warehouse in the marsh', a very fitting description for a settlement facing what is now the Ria Formosa.
With the arrival of Rome, Ossonoba became a city of substance. Between the 3rd century BC and the 4th century AD it formed part of the province of Lusitania and gained considerable regional importance: it had a forum and a temple, whose remains have turned up in excavations, and it minted its own coinage, a sign of its standing. Its prosperity was built on the sea. Like other cities on the Atlantic coast, Ossonoba lived on the production of garum — the prized fermented fish sauce enjoyed across the empire — and on salted fish, which it exported to many Roman cities. The remarkable Roman mosaic with the head of the god Oceanus, kept in the municipal museum, is an eloquent witness to that period.
After the crisis of the empire came the Germanic peoples, and Ossonoba was already the seat of a bishopric in Visigothic times, confirming that it remained an urban and religious centre of reference in the far south of Hispania. That continuity — Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths — is the base on which the later layers of the city's history would be built.
In the year 713, a few years after the Muslim landing on the peninsula, the city was occupied by the Arabs and Berbers who were conquering Hispania. Ossonoba was absorbed into al-Andalus and became part of the al-Gharb, the Andalusi 'west' that gave today's Algarve its name. Over the following centuries, under Islamic rule, the city kept its urban and commercial life, and a substantial Christian community — the Mozarabs — lived here, keeping their faith under Muslim power.
In the 9th century the city took a new name, Santa Maria Ibn Harun, after the founder of the Banu Harun dynasty, the family that governed the small taifa of Santa Maria do al-Gharb. After the caliphate of Córdoba broke up in the early 11th century, al-Andalus fragmented into many independent kingdoms, the taifas, and this south-western area became one of them, with its capital in the city itself. That is the period that left Faro much of its old street plan and its ring of walls, whose remains can still be seen in the Cidade Velha; the horseshoe arch preserved at the base of the later Arco da Vila is a tangible reminder of that Islamic wall.
The look of the old town also dates from this period, with its narrow lanes and organic layout, so different from the Roman grid. The Muslim city of Santa Maria was a prosperous and cultured centre of the al-Gharb for several centuries, until the advance of the Christian kingdoms of the north tightened the noose around the south of the peninsula.
The Christian conquest of southern Portugal was a long process, and it ended precisely in Faro. In 1249 the troops of King Afonso III took the city from the Muslims. With it fell the last important stronghold in the Algarve still in Islamic hands: the conquest of Faro effectively completed the Reconquest of the territory of present-day Portugal, whose borders were thus settled centuries before those of neighbouring Castile. That is why Portuguese kings added to their title that of 'king of Portugal and of the Algarve', reflecting the new addition.
The taking of the city did not mean, at least not immediately, the expulsion of the whole Muslim population. A good part of the Mudéjar community went on living in Faro, and in 1269 it received a royal charter guaranteeing freedom of worship and the right to keep its property in exchange for a special tax, in a coexistence that lasted for generations. The city was Christianised gradually: on the site of the ancient temple, later a mosque, the cathedral, the Sé, was raised, begun after the conquest.
Through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Faro gained weight over other Algarve cities. In 1540 it was officially raised to the rank of city. Its port, its trade and its status as a bishop's seat — the see was moved here from Silves — made it an increasingly important centre, with notable economic and cultural activity. It was even one of the first places in Portugal to have a printing press, linked to the Jewish community, in the 15th century. That rise, however, also made it a target for its enemies.
In 1580 Portugal was joined to the Spanish crown under Philip II, in what is known as the Iberian Union. That union dragged the country into the conflicts of the Spanish monarchy, and in particular into its clash with the England of Elizabeth I. Faro paid the price in 1596. That year a large English expedition that had attacked and sacked Cádiz set course, on the way home, for the coast of the Algarve. At its head was Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, the queen's favourite.
The English forces landed and stormed Faro, which was taken, sacked and burned. The attackers caused enormous damage: they burned much of the city's churches and buildings and carried off considerable loot. Among the plunder was a peculiar treasure: the library of the bishop of Faro, Fernando Martins Mascarenhas, a valuable collection of books. Those volumes travelled to England as part of the booty and ended up in the hands of Thomas Bodley, who added them to the collection with which, a few years later, he refounded the library of the University of Oxford. So today's Bodleian Library — one of the most famous libraries in the world — counts among its origins the books torn from Faro in 1596, where they remain. It is a real historical fact and one of the city's most singular stories.
The Essex sack was a brutal blow to Faro, which lost much of its heritage and had to rebuild. But the greatest catastrophes were still to come, and this time they would not come from human hands but from the earth.
The 18th century brought Faro two great seismic disasters. The first was the earthquake of 1722, which shook the eastern Algarve hard and caused damage and deaths in the city and its district. The second, far more devastating, was the great Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755, one of the largest in European history. Although its name evokes the capital, the undersea epicentre lay off Cape St Vincent, very close to the Algarve, so the whole region was among the worst hit. More than two hundred people died in Faro and most buildings suffered considerable damage; churches, convents and houses were ruined or badly damaged.
The rebuilding that followed largely shaped the city we see today, with its mix of Gothic, Renaissance and baroque elements, the result of successive works on damaged structures. Despite the blows, Faro consolidated its role through the 18th and 19th centuries as the Algarve's main city. In 1834 it officially became the district capital, an administrative status it still holds, and its port and trade cemented it as the region's centre. The Capela dos Ossos, built in the 19th century beside the Igreja do Carmo with the bones of more than a thousand friars, dates from this period and has curiously become one of the city's tourist emblems.
The 20th century finished defining contemporary Faro. The opening of Faro Airport in 1965 was decisive: it turned the city into the great gateway for international tourism to the Algarve — especially from Britain and Ireland — and transformed the economy of the whole region. To that was added, in recent decades, the University of the Algarve, which gave Faro student life and cultural weight. Today Faro is a quiet and often underrated capital, marked by its role as a place people pass through, but with more than two millennia of history behind it and the serene beauty of the Ria Formosa as its backdrop.