Tendais

- Igreja Matriz de Tendais (Parish Church), in Quinhão, built during the Pombaline period, with Baroque sculptures<p>- Ermida de Nossa Senhora do Rosário (Chapel), in Vila de Muros, Manueline in style, dating from the early sixteenth century<p>- Ermida de São Pedro Apóstolo (Chapel), in Granja, above one thousand metres, with a pilgrimage on 29 June<p>- Capela de Santa Quitéria (Chapel) and Casa da Portela, in Meridãos

Tendais spreads across the slopes of the Serra do Montemuro, in the valley of the river Bestança, in the municipality of Cinfães. It appears in documents dating back to 1109 and was a town and seat of its own municipality until 1826. Its fifteen hamlets are home to ancient chapels and manor houses, and it was in Vila de Muros that the explorer Serpa Pinto was born, in 1846.

Tendais stretches across the slopes of the serra do Montemuro, in the valley of the rio Bestança, in the municipality of Cinfães. The name derives from the Latin Tendales, and the earliest document mentioning it dates from 1109. The villages took shape after the Reconquista, around the streams of Prados and Bestança, and by 1258 the jurisdiction of Tendais already existed, with almost all of today's villages cited in the Inquirições of King Afonso III.<p>The parish separated from that of São Salvador in the thirteenth century, and tradition links this independence to D. Cristina Rodrigues. Tendais was a town and the seat of its own municipality until 1826, when that municipality was abolished and merged into Cinfães. From those days, traces of a Manueline pillory survive in the area of Quinhão. In 1801 the settlement had nearly 1,500 inhabitants.<p>Religious heritage is scattered across the fifteen hamlets of the parish. The mother church (parish church), in Quinhão, dates from the Pombaline period and houses Baroque sculptures of Santa Bárbara and São Sebastião. The ermida de Nossa Senhora do Rosário (chapel of Nossa Senhora do Rosário), in Vila de Muros, is Manueline, dating from the early sixteenth century, and the ermida de São Lourenço, in Marcelim, bears the date 1758 carved above its doorway. In Granja, above a thousand metres, the ermida de São Pedro draws pilgrims on 29 June.<p>Meridãos is one of the villages with the greatest number of manor houses: the Casa da Portela, the only coat-of-arms-bearing house in the former municipality, the Casa do Outeiro de Meridãos, with a sixteenth-century core, and the chapel of Santa Quitéria, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the Quinta das Poldras, in Vila de Muros, the explorer Serpa Pinto was born on 20 April 1846.<p>Like so many mountain communities, Tendais has been steadily losing people to emigration: the population reached nearly 2,500 in 1930 and today numbers fewer than 700, guardians of granite villages, terraced hillsides and chapels.