Very often fortifications were built over the foundations or remnants of earlier castles, although with designs more compatible with contemporaneous defence needs.
Fortifications Jalali (ex-São João) & Mirani do not escape the rule; they were built upon earlier Islamic forifications by Portuguese Rui Freire.
Mucat presents an extremely nice and curious defence net. Formed by three defence sysems, each with a different purpose.
The first one composed by a wall of envolving the city, as a primary line of defence. In the surrounding mountain heights towers of survey and atck form a circle around the harbour and the city.
These third complex, Jalali and Mirani together with Matrah, were the more sophisticated expression of what may be called the art of defence based in a Luso-Arab cultural whole and not Luso-European.
This might have been the greatest Lusitanian creation on what concerns their way of projecting and living architeture. Seeking to mix with the gigantic landscape that involves it and to which forms an integring part, all geographic irregularities are profited, with the capacity and shrewdness well typical of their know how to live with geographic discontinuity.
Although this formidable defence complex was considered unassailable, it was subdued by the Omanits in 1653.
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