The town of Mação
The Mação municipality is situated on the right bank of the Tagus river, between the borders of Alto Ribatejo and Beiras, in a land of transition, marked by the stark diversity between the two surrounding regions.
Mação is a Portuguese small town with about 2 200 inhabitants that belongs to the district of Santarém and the eastern sub-region of Médio Tejo.
It is the seat of the municipality with a total area of 400.83 km² and 7 338 inhabitants divided into eight parishes.
The calm and lush waters of the Tagus and the Ribeira de Eiras on the Belver Dam, in Ortiga, are a heaven for water sports.
Its landscape ranges from beautiful mountains to waterfalls that end in delightful rock pools to cliff faces, that resemble medieval castles, implanted in the immense peaks, basking in the pure mountain air, to the further charm of vast refreshing reservoirs, by the Belver and Pracana dams, where everything is possible and desirable, with water going as far as the eye can see.
Origins
An immensely rich ground for palaeontologists and archaeologists is spread over the whole municipality of Mação. Fossils can be found in each of Mação’s parishes but the keystone of the town’s heritage (a lot of which comes from the Roman era) is the Roman baths in Ortiga.
