Specific characteristics
Along the walls that surround this enclosure, there are canopied stone benches, which served as pedestals where the girls used to rest their twenty litre pitchers and wooden jugs, and benches for the young men who would ?capture? the beautiful girls or would wait for them at dusk, for long-awaited rendezvous or just for a drink of cool water savoured directly from their pitchers which the young men would then help to balance on the girls? heads, in a gesture of courteous gallantry.
Notes
According to Vergílio Correia and A. Nogueira Gonçalves, the fountain was used by the Romans, as Roman mosaics were found close by.
An important spring gushes forth there, and a stream - Vala de Ançã - that crosses the Town and provides water to irrigate the farmlands up to the neighbouring village (S. João do Campo).