The House of the Inquisition is an interpretive site in the medieval hill town of Monsaraz, operated within the municipality of Reguengos de Monsaraz. Installed in a two storey building on Travessa do Quebra Costas, it is identified by local tradition as a “House of the Inquisition” and functions today as a small interactive center dedicated to Jewish history, the experience of New Christians, and the mechanisms of inquisitorial repression in the Alentejo region.

The site’s curatorial narrative is careful about the limits of what can be historically asserted. Official descriptions emphasize that Monsaraz did not host an Inquisition tribunal, and that trials involving local New Christians fell under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office in Évora. The building’s association with inquisitorial activity is therefore framed as plausible local usage rather than a formal court, for example as lodging for an agent of the Holy Office or as temporary custody before transfer to Évora. This distinction matters, because it separates documented institutional geography from the powerful afterlife of oral memory in places shaped by fear, denunciation, and surveillance.

Within this frame, the House of the Inquisition presents Jewish presence in Monsaraz as older than the sixteenth century and not reducible to persecution alone. Municipal interpretive text points to medieval documentary references that indicate an established Jewish minority in the region prior to the Inquisition, and the center positions itself as a local node where dispersed evidence, archival references, and historical scholarship can be brought together for public interpretation.

In broader historical context, the Portuguese Inquisition created a system that targeted New Christians across Portugal, combining religious policing with social control and the production of stigma over generations. For visitors, the Monsaraz center works as a micro scale entry point into this wider history, translating national level mechanisms into a landscape of local memory, jurisdictional routes to Évora, and the long persistence of coerced identities in Iberian society.