Chocalhos Pardalinho – Cowbell Workshop

Alcáçovas, in the municipality of Viana do Alentejo, has been the centre of Portuguese cowbell making since at least the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth the trade was the village's main livelihood. The bells, called chocalhos, were hung round the necks of grazing animals so that shepherds could find and recognise their flocks. In December 2015 UNESCO inscribed the manufacture of cowbells on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Chocalhos Pardalinho, a company formed in 2009 to carry on a family trade going back to 1913, is the largest of the few workshops still at work.

Each bell starts as a sheet of iron, cut to size and hammered into shape over an anvil. It is then packed, together with small pieces of brass, inside a casing of clay kneaded with straw and fired in a kiln at well over a thousand degrees, so that the molten brass coats the iron. Once the casing is broken off, a master tunes the bell by hand until it gives a strong, clean note; no two sound the same. Besides bells for livestock, the workshop makes decorative and personalised pieces, and it teaches new bell makers so that the craft continues.

Guided tours, which must be booked in advance, follow the whole process on the workshop floor and are given in several languages. In the Cowbell Maker for a Day experience, participants make a bell of their own. A shop sells bells and other handmade goods. The workshop is on the small industrial estate of Alcáçovas; in the village itself, the Paço dos Henriques houses an interpretation centre devoted to the craft. Alcáçovas lies on the N2 road, around thirty kilometres south-west of Évora.