The small village of Sortelha appears between the mist of the dawn encaramada in one narrow top of the Serra gives Opa. According to they raise clouds, the horizon is extended gradually, only trimmed by esbelta tower that has grown on heavy rocks of the mountain. Green moss is the one in charge, with the passage of the centuries, to seal to the artificial stone unions and buildings doing difficult to distinguish between and others.
The enigmas of Sortelha as soon as they keep awake when the sun manages to impose its light to the persistent mountain fog. Old village, of origin hispanoárabe, remains isolated (until her a pregnant highway arrives from shaken returns and) and surrounded in I pull ahead mysterious of which the roquero castle escapes neither, nor the profiles of rocks, nor so at least its own name.
Sortelha towards part of the important line of defense of border castles, built or mostly reconstructed on castros of the old Iberian civilizations and their name also derives from the terrain relief on steep rocks that surround the village in form by ring (ring, in Castilian), being constructed the walls in circular form.
The entrance is formed by a gothic door on which a balcony is seen (Varanda de Pilatos), with openings (it kills-cães) by which sent all type of projectiles against the attackers. Before the entrance, they deserve our attention pretty pelourinho, ended by the sphere to armilar, symbol of D. Manuel I and the building in which they worked the Paços do Concelho, both of the time of that king. In the threshold of another door, drawee towards the west, two grooves in the stone represent metric measures (the greater one, the “twig” and smallest “côvado”), that served as reference to the medieval retailers, in a time in that the metric systems were not uniformizados.
In the first church, of the s. XIV, is an interesting work in the ceiling hispanoárabe and the golden stature of the greater altar, added at the time barroca. The enchantment of this village resides in its medieval atmosphere, in which the houses, all constructed in granite stone and, generally, of a single floor, are cimientan on the rock and harmonize with the topography of the land. Outside the walls another modern village grew, lamentably in desraizados architectonic molds of the tradition.
Around Sortelha the landscape has the robust beauty of great granite stones and the brown forests that accompany them. In the locality of Casteleiro, in the highway towards Belmonte, the medicinal stay of the Radium Waters was located, that were considered between most radioactive of the world. Also it will be able to make a healthful route on foot following the old route Roman-medieval, through which they passed the travelling ones towards Santiago de Compostela.