A popular, unlikely belief suggests that the city of Gouveia was populated by the Turduli in the 6th century BC. However, the oldest remains in the city date back to the Largo do Castelo, where in the 1940s 3 funerary pots were found, dated at the time, to the Bronze Age, with traces of incineration and remains of human bones.

In addition, the old Gauvé is located in the center of the country, in a region proven to be part of of the Lusitanians, a Celtic tribe that is much more natural as having given rise to Gouveia.

From the Roman period, a votive altar consecrated to the Lusitanian God Salqiu and a tomb of a Roman warrior, containing several metal artifacts (axe, knife and arrowhead) next to the old S. Pedro primary school.

The Roman roads that exist both in the upper municipality, namely in Folgosinho (Galhardos and Cantarinhos), as in the lower municipality, in this case, in Vila Nova de Tazem (section of Teixugueira-Parigueira) are proof of the regional experience and dynamics in the Roman era, in the region, without, however, having found proof of the legal-administrative status, knowing only that it was integrated into the province of Lusitania.

The stretches of Roman road in the upper part of the municipality are part of the road that connected Mérida to Braga, crossing the Alcantara Bridge.

During the occupation of the Germanic and Muslim peoples, nothing is known about Gaudella high medieval; only that Ferdinand the Great conquered it by capitulating to the Muslims in 1055, with the first reference to Gouveia Castle appearing in a document from the Pope Innocent II, 1135. Queen Teresa donated it as a haven, in the year 1125, to the friars of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, based in the Monastery of Águas Santas, in Maia.

Sancho I of Portugal, granted it a charter in 1186, filling its residents with privileges, trying to thus ensuring its repopulation. Afonso II of Portugal renewed its charter in 1217, increasing its privileges even further and received a new Manueline charter in 1510.

Regarding the local fortress, its existence is only known through some records. documents, such as the letter that King D.Pedro II sent to the Gouveia council, asking that cleaned and illuminated the Castle of Gouveia, because his sister, Catarina de Bragança, after widowed by Charles II of England, she returned to the Portuguese court, entering the province from Beira in 1693, staying here for a few days.

The castle would have been obliterated when General Massena's troops withdrew during the 3rd French Invasion, within the scope of the Peninsular War, around March 21, 1811, although it was already in ruins by that time.

The Jewish community in Gouveia during the Middle Ages is known through the names and professions of some Sephardic Hebrews of the 1st century. XIV and XV. In 1967 a Hebrew inscription was found while the houses were being destroyed for the construction of the CTT building. It would serve as a torsa for the old synagogue of Gouveia, located in New Street. It reads the year 5257 of the Jewish era (1496/7 of the Christian era) and would have been the last synagogue. built in the Iberian Peninsula before the Manueline edict