Alcanede Castle is located in the parish of the same name, in the municipality and district of Santarém, Portugal.
It is believed that the earliest human occupation of the site dates back to a prehistoric castrum, fortified at the time of the Roman occupation and later reinforced and expanded.
At the time of the Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula it was taken by Count D. Henrique (1091) and later recovered by the Moors. Its definitive possession was obtained from the conquest by King D. Afonso Henriques (1112-1185), in the context of the conquests of Santarém and Lisbon. Its first mayor was D. Gonçalo Mendes de Sousa, chief butler of D. Afonso Henriques, who was responsible for rebuilding and expanding the walled enclosure and populating and organizing the town, before 1163.
The 1531 earthquake shook its structure, marking the beginning of its decline. With no military function or strategic importance, there was no interest in repairing it, plunging it into abandonment and oblivion. At the beginning of the 1940s, it was subject to restoration work seeking to return it to its approximate form at the end of the Middle Ages, conserving it as a historical landmark in the region's landscape.