Set in a plateau, its high location conferring it great security against invasions, it is today one of the main testimonials of the peninsular northwestern fortified civilization, applying to the status of World Heritage by UNESCO.
In an ample platform, occupying about 44 acres, the excavations disclosed 150 circular and quadrangular constructions, grouped in about 40 sets of familiar units.
The visitor of the Fortified Village has the chance to admire a reconstruction of one of these familiar units, seeing its volume in the archaeological context, as well as the interior spaces (patio or street, main house with annex or vestibule), a circular support house and an ensemble of annexes that might have worked as storage and animal shelter - ovine, goat, bovine and equine.
Between the 2nd century b.C. and its total abandonment in the 4th century, the Fortified Village of Sanfins played a role of a great metropolis and cultural centre for all the region. Today, visiting it provides us with a true History lesson, in a place with a panoramic view on the entire municipality, the Atlantic coast, the Vizela and Sousa valleys, with the distant involving mountains of Cabreira, Marão and Alvão as a scenery.

ACCESS and LOCATION:
6 km to the north of Paços de Ferreira with access by municipal roads, like EN 209, meeting the Porto - Paços de Ferreira itinerary in the parish of Carvalhosa, to the left of the EN 207 road.

FRAMING:
Agricultural and isolated, a hill over a small river flowing to Eiriz River.

CHRONOLOGY:
Proto-History. Possible construction from the town's first stage in the 11th century b.C. There are traces of Roman occupation, but also of other periods until the Middle Age. In the periphery (a hillside to that effect) are the public baths, with a steam chamber and cold water tanks, apart from a conviviality and leisure space. Next to the town's upper platform are the remains of a Necropolis and a Chapel.
The Fortified Village was excavated in 1895 by Francisco Martins Sarmento and José Leite de Vasconcelos. In 1944/1945 more excavations took place under the orientation of Father Eugênio Jalhay and Afonso do Paço. In 1951 and 1967 it was studied by the Faculty of Arts of Porto's archaeology team, under the guidance of Armando C. F. da Silva. From 1972 to 1974 it was Carlos Alberto F. de Almeida's turn. Between 1977 and 1983, again the team from the Faculty of Arts of Porto, under the responsibility of Armando C. F. da Silva and Rui Sobral Centeno, ending with a museum project for the Archaeological Station. In 1995 the ethno-archaeological reconstruction of an habitational nucleus was promoted and a replica of the Statue of the Warrior was made and placed next to the second wall door, between two enormous rocks that tipped a narrow entrance.

ESTATE:
The enormous estate that can be seen in the Archaeological Museum of Sanfins (House of the Brandões), is composed of innumerable common ceramic fragments from the Iron Age, Roman and imported ceramic, glass fragments, tegulae and imbrex, manual rotating millstones, many metallic coins and some utensils, as well as gold and silver broaches, adornments and jewellery. Two ploughs, two untitled stones and the statue of the warrior can also be seen.

TYPOLOGY:
"Fortified village, defended by 3 wall lines surrounding it, reinforced from West to South by an exterior wall. They present a maximum thickness of about 3,5 m by the doors, these being in the interior defensive lines and faced West, the defence complemented to North and South by an irrigation ditch excavated in the outcrop. Next to the second wall door the place where the warrior statue would have been implanted was detected, meeting, in situ, the feet of the statue sculpted in a rock. The village is structured by 1 main group of streets oriented N/S, articulated with other street groups towards E/W, in predominantly orthogonal alignments, conferring it a regular type plant. The interventions carried through allowed to exhume about 160 circular constructions, with or without vestibule and of quadrangular plant, the habitation structures being integrated by 4 or 5 of these constructions converging in a paved common patio, sided by the streets and defined by a wall, forming a sort of block, with the average area of 200 to 300 m2. In the central platform two great rectangular constructions stand out from the domestic construction nucleus, which, facing the exhumed estate, are considered of religious character. In the acropolis' upper platform, a medieval cemetery with 34 graves faced E/W is seen, formed by a trapezoidal box, structured and covered with granite flagstones and overlapped with the foundation of a rectangular chapel, set E/W, devoted to Saint Romão. Downtown, inside the platform defended by the exterior wall, is the baths building, an underground stone structure composed of a subcircular oven, with a masonry wall and vaulted ceiling, preceding a rectangular chamber with paved floor, walls in great monoliths and covered by granite flagstone in two kinds, separated from the antechamber by a great carved flagstone with a double rope decoration around the semicircular opening in its base, that one equally paved and with great monolith walls, flanked by long rock benches and opening to the forecourt, where one can find 2 tanks for cold water baths, being the irrigation system, granite gutters, and the sewer made in rock and visible. Sided by a diving source." (Isabel Sereno and Paulo Amaral) (IPPAR)