Fonte das Bicas (Fountain of the Spouts)

Every native of Borba knows the tradition: the three spouts correspond to the three ages of life. The one on the right is for the single, the middle one for the married, the one on the left for the widowed. And whoever drinks this water, they say, never strays far from Borba. But the true story, hidden in the town council's records, is more interesting than the legend.

It all began with a famous spring, the Fonte dos Finados, whose water the doctors declared "among the most wholesome on the continent." For that very reason, it was fought over for decades: private landowners who diverted the overflow to their gardens, promising a public fountain they never built, and an old fountain, too small and too deep, where the records note "misfortunes" — almost certainly drownings.

In 1775, the council decided to stop patching things up. It gathered nobility and commoners, sold council property, and hired a military engineer to design not a fountain, but a system: the water would first supply the people, then irrigate the gardens, and finally strengthen the Ribeira de Borba — the same flow that turned the watermills and went on, downstream, to feed the Royal Tapada of Vila Viçosa. A work built to serve everyone at once.

It cost six thousand cruzados, a fortune for a council this size. The channels were made of marble, and the carved figures are attributed to two sculptor brothers from the town itself. In 1786, Queen Maria I visited Borba, and the fountain must have been the pride they showed her. It was completed in 1788 — and that very year the council had to forbid people from washing clothes where they were meant to drink. Not even the finest engineering can overcome, overnight, the habits of an entire town.

Today it is a National Monument, and the monument most loved by the people who live here. And perhaps the legend of the three ages is true: this fountain was born to serve the whole of life in Borba, because a handful of councillors decided that the water of this land would belong to no one. It would belong to everyone.