The old fountain

1 - The fountain

The “Fonte Velha”, a name consecrated by the voice of the people, appears in the documents as fountain (or “fountains”) of the village, Fonte da Vila, or Fonte Antiga, this patent in the books of Minutes of the Junta at the end of the 19th century, for example.
Located on Rua do Relego, in the southern part of the village, the oldest and most historic fringe of the village. The façade has an entrance with a perfect arched portal through which the interior and its diving tank and shell spout can be accessed. The building is covered by a barrel vault, with a protruding vault closure where there is a cubic pedestal that, in comparison with other sources of similar morphology, may have supported a decorative element in stone of a heraldic nature. The fountain is located at lower levels of street level and is accessed by a staircase of stone steps, and stone walls also accompany the path and compartmentalize the space, tracing a small lobular enclosure next to it. The works of reconstruction and rehabilitation of the fountain undertaken by the municipality lowered the ground outside the fountain to the initial levels and exposed a subsidiary tank with stone walls.

2 - Its origin
The Fountain was built as a result of a royal charter dated April 11, 1685 (1), whose transcript was published by Sousa Viterbo in 1904 (Viterbo, 1904:386-387). According to the content of this permit (which we will reproduce at the end), the village already had a source, closer to the river, but because it does not always have water and is not always in good condition, as it damages the waters and muds (“nateiros”). ) of the river, the Chamber of Alfeizerão asked the king to build a source further away from the river with the money left over from the sisas, and to take advantage of the opportunity to carry out other necessary works in the village, such as repairing the walls of the county’s corral. and build a wall between the (now disappeared) chapel of Espírito Santo and the wall of a neighboring house to stop the sands that with the wind clogged the streets of the village. An auction is held to carry out these works and they are auctioned off by António Rodrigues («António Roiz»), master builder of Nossa Senhora da Nazaré, for the price of two hundred thousand réis.
About this master builder, whose full name was António Rodrigues de Carvalho, it is possible to specify that he had worked as a bricklayer in Coimbra, in the borough of Celas, parish of the Sé of the same city and that from 1678 onwards there are reliable data on the his residence in Alcobaça, first as a master bricklayer and then as a master builder at the Royal Monastery of Alcobaça (Portela, 2016:8-9). As master builder of the Royal House of N. Sra. da Nazaré, and during the period in which he built the Alfeizerão Fountain, he directed the works to expand the chancel of that church between 1683 and 1691, also taking charge of the works on the new fountain, pulpit and paving of the sanctuary church (Penteado , 1998:156).

3 - Chronology
In Father Luís Cardoso’s Geographical Dictionary, it is considered that “the water from the fountain of this Villa was warm in winter and cold in summer, and so thin, that there was no person in this land who, drinking from it, suffered from stone complaints” (Cardoso, 1751:278). About three decades later, the chronicler Frei Manuel de Figueiredo (Coutinho, p.8) tells us about its decadence: «Its fountain is in total ruin: its water is considered to be natural [as] of excellent quality» .
On the degradation of the fountain in this century, we have a complementary source. In 1788, six years after the handwritten chorographic notes by Frei Manuel de Figueiredo, a petition addressed to the queen (2) asks for her intervention in various problems that oppressed the people of the town, among them, the ruin of their public fountain, whose cause it had been, they alleged, the Bachelor Agostinho José Salazar. The latter, who had two watermills in the village, the “Moinhos da Calçada”, had changed the draining ditch of one of his watermills and had placed it next to the ditch of the source that led the waters to the river and which, having been clogged up, stagnated. the water from the source «in the form of a buried well. Which was bad because there was no other source in the village from which they could drink, nor in their neighbourhood». He asked the people of the village to build a new fountain in the village, or for the Crown to cite the Bachelor to change his ditch so that the waters of the public fountain could also flow (Coutinho, 2020: 3-5).
The Old Fountain was recovered and continued to be used by the village, but news of maintenance and repair work on this fountain emerges from time to time. One of the most recent is recorded at the end of the 19th century, when there were already other sources of drinking water in the village. In a minutes of the Parish Council of Alfeizerão dated October 19, 1890, the executive determines to ask the Alcobaça City Council for a subsidy to «clean the old fountain and repair the well in Santo Amaro square» (in “Livro das Minutes of the Parish Council”, 1884-1891, f. 97v).


Sources:
(1) DGA/TT, Chancellery of D. Afonso VI, liv. 54, page 321r
(2) DGA/TT, Kingdom Ministry,