Sargento-Mor

Sargento-Mor is a small locality in the municipality of Mealhada, in the Aveiro district or the adjacent Coimbra district border area. Its name means Sergeant Major, a military rank toponym of the kind found across Portugal where officers, especially from the seventeenth and eighteenth century period of military reorganisation, gave their names or titles to estates and settlements where they held land or authority.

The locality is modest and without significant infrastructure, set in the agricultural and lightly forested terrain of the Coimbra-Aveiro transition zone. The toponym is one of the more unusual along this section of the Camino Português, preserving a social-historical memory in an otherwise unremarkable rural locality.

On the Camino Português, Sargento-Mor is a passage point on the approach to the first Aveiro district towns, in the flat and rolling terrain north of Coimbra.