It is set in a natural amphitheatre open to the east and to the Vale do Álamo megalithic landscape, with which it has a meaningful visual relationship.

Perdigões is a large ditched enclosure covering around 16ha. It has a circular and concentric plan, with 16 ditches already identified, and a long chronology that stretches from the end of the Middle Neolithic (c. 3400 BC) to the beginning of the Bronze Age (c. 2000 BC). Its architecture incorporates cosmological principles related to the solar cycle, with entrances aligned with the solstices and equinoxes at sunrise and sunset, thus turning the horizon to the east, with the Monsaraz elevation in the middle, into an annual calendar of the rising sun.

Inside and on its periphery were collective funerary contexts with essentially secondary deposits (forming ossuaries) and other contexts that revealed the ritual handling of human remains. A ceremonial timber structure (Timber Circle), with a circular plan of 20m in diameter comprised of concentric circles of palisades and log alignments, was identified in its centre. It is a unique structure in the Iberian Peninsula and has its main parallels in the British Isles.

In addition to periodic housing structures (huts), numerous contexts and materials revealed ritualised practices and large-scale trade networks, including North African ivory, limestone from Extremadura, variscite from the Sierra Morena, flint from the Granada area, marine shells, cinnabar from the Almaden mine in Ciudad Real, and amber from Sicily. Such networks are also observable in the mobility of people and animals, with high percentages of non-local individuals (66% and 40%, respectively) among the remains analysed. These high percentages of mobility emphasise the nature of Perdigões as a ceremonial centre of assembly throughout its extensive biography.

The result of a research project led continuously by ERA Arqueologia S.A. since 1998, with the permanent support of Esporão S.A. and the collaboration of numerous national and international institutions, there is a long list of publications, communications and academic theses on Perdigões, almost all of which are available online (https://perdigoes.org/bibliografia/)

Esporão S.A. owns two-thirds of the archaeological complex, and the remaining third (south side) is divided between various owners. Perdigões received status as a National Monument in 2019 and is today one of the international references for research into the societies of recent prehistory.

There is an interpretive exhibition on this impressive archaeological site at Torre da Herdade do Esporão (Reguengos de Monsaraz).