Confined to the genetic hill, the Lamego community resisted the advances and setbacks of its conquerors until the 11th century. The expansion of its urbanization was structured in a time of peace around two temples: the one in São Sebastião, at a lower level than the acropolis, and the one in Santa Maria de Almacave, almost at the gates of the walled town. With the parish definition around the main urban temples and the royal creation of the Episcopal Couto, the city split into two territories: the first handed over to the municipal government and the second subject to the episcopal power, where the prelates never stopped focusing on Rossio and in the cathedral your attention. But the temporal domain of the antistites, which was very present in the Renaissance interventions from D. Fernando Meneses Coutinho to D. António Teles de Meneses - who clearly outlined public projects to embellish their surroundings -, extended to the town and its surroundings, imposing urban morphology and the surrounding landscape, an indirect domain, whether by the sponsorship of certain works (including the installation of monastic houses), or by the rehabilitation of places of obscured cults. These buildings occupied key sites in the city and created elements and structuring points, such as new roads or extended spaces (squares or churchyard) that determined new paths in urban and / or peripheral morphology - for religious or economic reasons (eg romages and fairs) . Its construction can be seen from a strategic point of view: institution of new places of cultural attraction, extension of ecclesiastical power (namely episcopal) and even the monumentalization of urbanism - within a spirit or even awareness of the importance of patronage intervention (from the points educational and even political) in the public space. This aspect is reflected not only in the couto with the improvements of certain prelates, but in the works carried out during the first episcopates of the sixteenth century and in those of the eighteenth century, in peripheral areas, as far as it was possible to increase urban limits or dominion ( although informal) from Mitra. Examples of this are the construction of the Chagas monastery that took advantage of one side of the Tabolado yard (associated since the Middle Ages with the commercial life of Lamego) and the convent of Santa Cruz implanted in a small plan on the couto (which will become a market place) and business - both projects cherished by Lecce's prelates. Currently, it is impossible to dissociate the main works from the 16th or 18th centuries, such as the hermitages of Espírito Santo or Virgem do Remédios, from contemporary urban morphology, although in some cases it has not been respected. the visual importance and perception of space, which men of the 16th and 18th centuries recognized or attributed to those buildings and their surroundings - they are one of the main reasons for the aggrandizement and expansion that the city of Lamego has known throughout the modern era, in part thanks to the action of its prelates.