Culture

Palacete dos Viscondes de Balsemão
23 November, 2024 / ,

It is a historic building located in Praça de Carlos Alberto, in the parish of Vitória, in the city of Porto, built in the mid-18th century by the nobleman José Alvo Brandão.

In the 1840s, António Bernardino Peixe rented the palace and moved his inn in Rua do Bonjardim to this location.

What made this inn famous was the stay, between 19 and 27 April 1849, of the exiled King Charles Albert of Sardinia, while he waited for the Quinta da Macieirinha house to be prepared, where he died on 28 July of the same year.

Since 1996, a number of Porto City Council departments have been operating here, namely the Municipal Directorate of Culture, the Urban Archaeology Office and the Numismatics Office.

Here we find the Materials Bank, an innovative project that promotes the safeguarding of materials that characterise the city’s image, collecting them from dilapidated buildings to be demolished or altered.

These include decorative and constructive elements from buildings in Porto, such as pieces of stucco from Avelino Ramos Meira’s workshop, as well as tiles with many patterns from the 17th to 20th centuries, as well as street signs collected over the years, and wooden, iron and stonework artefacts.

Also housed in the palace is the Triplex, which has a series of exhibition rooms on the ground floor.

O Porto em Miniatura
21 November, 2024 / , , ,

‘Porto em Miniatura is a unique exhibition that recreates Porto’s most emblematic monuments on a reduced scale.

Each miniature has been crafted with an incredible level of detail, providing a new perspective on the city’s historical heritage.

There are two dozen models: the Clérigos Tower, São Bento Station, the suspension bridge, the monumental Cathedral complex, Quinta do Viso, Cadeia da Relação and various churches and chapels, as well as beautiful kiosks and the traditional urinals of yesteryear.

The materials used in construction are the most varied, such as wood, corticite, copper, brass and plaster, among others.

The author

Born in Porto on 11 August 1923, Agostinho Conceição Gonçalves Teixeira left a remarkable legacy as the guardian of his hometown’s historical and architectural memory.

His life path, marked by dedication to work and culture, reflects the story of a simple man with a singular passion.

With impressive precision and detail, Agostinho Teixeira dedicated himself to creating miniatures of Porto’s main monuments.

His collection includes around 40 models, including representations of the old Crystal Palace.

His work, initially given to the Foundation for the Social Development of Porto, was exhibited at the Casa de Bonjóia with the aim of raising funds for social purposes.

In 2006, the collection was handed over to Francisco Almeida Lemos, who continues to preserve it, ensuring that the legacy of Agostinho Conceição Gonçalves Teixeira lives on.

The Bridges that no longer exist…
4 October, 2021 / ,

For many years, the crossing of the river from one bank to the other was made with the help of rafts and boats.

It was only in 1369 that a walkway was inaugurated consisting of boats, an iron chain that joined them and a wooden platform on which people walked.
But there was one major drawback, whenever the water levels of the river rose due to heavy rains, the improvised bridge was destroyed.

The somewhat more sophisticated Ponte das Barcas was built for longer-lasting purposes, designed by Carlos Amarante and inaugurated on the 15th August 1806.
This was considered the first bridge that connected Porto and Gaia.

It was made with 20 barges placed in parallel, connected by steel cables, and supporting a series of wooden planks, with two openings for river traffic, so that boats going up and down the river could pass. Furthermore, it was a collapsible bridge, so it could adapt as the currents of the Douro increased or decreased.

This innovation only arrived in 1806 but it had its end in 1809, the idea was short-lived.

On 29 March 1809, during Napoleon’s Second French Invasion, when General Soult’s army was marching on the city with the intention of destroying it, the desperate population rushed towards the river to cross over to the Gaia side.

With the amount of panicked people on the bridge, it collapsed. The central trapdoor opened and the bridge collapsed.

Over 4000 people died.

After the Ponte das Barcas tragedy, another bridge had to be built.

This bridge was built in 1843 and was named D. Maria II, but popularly became known as Ponte Pênsil, because as the name indicates, it was built on the suspension system or supported by iron, which rises 10 meters above the average water level, and allowed a span of 170 meters,.

The Ponte Pênsil – officially D. Maria II – is a beautiful work for the time, by the engineers Bigot and Mellet.

This was the first fixed construction built under the Douro River, and it was active for about 45 years, until it was replaced by the Luiz I Bridge, which was built next to it.

It was inaugurated in 1842 and demolished in 1887 to make way for the bridge that honoured the king of the time: D. Luís I.

D. Maria Pia Bridge
4 October, 2021 / , , ,

It was designed by engineer Theophile Seyrig and inaugurated in October 1877.

It had 150 workers from Eiffel Constructions Métalliques, and used 1,600,000 kg of iron.

It was the first construction to take into account the effects of the region’s winds, and despite the complexity of the bridge it did not take even 2 years to build.

The dimensions of the width of the river and the surrounding escarpments, required the construction of the largest iron arch in the world, with a span of 160m, and a deck of 352m, 61m away from the average water level of the river. It was a construction at the limit of the possibilities of metallic construction. At the time, this bridge was an engineering feat that dazzled the Portuguese and foreigners alike.

It marked the arrival of the railway to the city of Porto, and the connection between Porto and the south at the railway level was its function. It made it possible to complete the railway connection between Porto and Lisbon which, at the time, ended at Devesas station in Vila Nova de Gaia. It had a profound impact on the economy of the region, as the city of Porto became the hub of a set of important railway lines and allowed the reordering of the urban fabric according to the location of the stations.

The inauguration party on 4 November 1877 was a great success, presided over by King Luís I and Queen Maria Pia, after whom it was named.

The crowds came to watch the memorable spectacle, filling the surroundings of the “work of art”, waving handkerchiefs as the first train crossed the bridge, with 24 carriages and around 1200 people on board.
The safety of the bridge has been amply proven with the passage of trains for over 100 years.
It is classified as a national monument and is the only Portuguese monument on the American Society of Engineering’s list of great engineering works.

With the appearance of the new São João Bridge, the D Maria Pia bridge was decommissioned on 1 June 1991, and since that day it has been patiently awaiting the future, with the restoration of this work of art a priority.

Writers’ route through Porto ( Raul Brandão )
5 April, 2021 / ,

He was born at no. 12 of what was then Rua da Bela Vista, in Foz do Douro, on March 12th 1867 – the street that later adopted the writer’s name – Raul Brandão.

Being a descendant of fishermen, and Foz being the place where he spent his adolescence and youth, the sea was a recurring theme in his work, as in Os Pescadores.

He was a Portuguese military man, journalist and writer, famous for the realism of his descriptions and the lyricism of his language.

He left an extensive literary and journalistic work that greatly influenced literature in the Portuguese language.
His work influenced so much that the Azorean Islands are known by a colour code that was part of his work “The unknown islands”.

With Júlio Brandão, also an author, he was a playwright, writing Noite de Natal, which went on stage at the D. Maria II National Theatre in 1899.

Raul Germano Brandão was one of the greatest landmarks of Porto’s literature. He died at the age of 63 on December 5th 1930.

He received several honorary initiatives, such as a monument erected in his honour, in the garden of Passeio Alegre

The 150th anniversary of his birth was celebrated with the publication of three works of the writer, one of them with unpublished texts, the last book that Raul Brandão wrote but that had never been published.

Luíz I Bridge
5 March, 2021 / ,

One of the most important and popular city landmarks of the Invincible City, is the Luiz I bridge.

It connects the Ribeira do Porto to the quay of Vila Nova de Gaia, and all locals know it, and probably most have had the privilege of crossing it on the upper or lower board.

In 1879, they began to think about the replacement of the Pênsil Bridge, which in conclusion they discovered was not as efficient for the traffic that was growing between Porto and Gaia, and in 1881 it starts but only 5 years later it was inaugurated.

The bridge had two inauguration moments: the upper level was inaugurated on 31 October 1886, on King D. Luiz’s birthday; and the lower level was only inaugurated one year later.

The author of the bridge was Théophile Sevrig, a disciple of Gustav Eiffel, and not the author of the Eiffel Tower himself as many people think.

Between 1886 and 1944 anyone wanting to cross the bridge had to pay a toll, and this amount was paid per person.
Road traffic on the upper level was only prohibited since 2003, the year in which it was adapted to the metro.

This bridge innovated at the time by having two platforms that took into account the two different elevations of the cities. The upper level is 395 metres long, and the lower level 174 metres.

This masterpiece, was the bridge with the longest wrought iron arch in the world, for many years – 172m. Only in 2017 was it surpassed by a Chinese bridge.

In December 2019, the Luiz I Bridge was considered one of the 15 most beautiful bridges in Europe by European Best Destinations, a European consumer and expert organisation promoting tourism and culture in Europe, based in Brussels.

Did you Know?

The name of the bridge is a tribute to the King Dom Luiz I, married to Maria Pia, who had already given the name to the railway bridge.

The people of Porto brought forward the inauguration ceremony to coincide with the King’s birthday, but the story tells that the King didn’t appear, which offended Porto’s population, who removed the royal title from the bridge, naming it just “Luiz I”.

Arrábida Bridge
1 March, 2021 / , , ,

The Arrábida Bridge is an internationally recognised masterpiece of bridge engineering.

When it was completed in 1963, it was the longest span reinforced concrete arch bridge in the world. It is considered a masterpiece of Bridge Engineering. It is 500 metres long and 70 metres above river level.

It is the first large bridge over the Douro River entirely conceived, designed and built by Portuguese Engineering. Its author has signed bridge projects on four continents – the Engineer Edgar Cardoso.

Its construction lasted 7 years (between 1956 and 1963) and the small house from which the construction of the bridge was coordinated is still there. Nowadays it is the Casa D’Oro restaurant.

The Arrábida bridge filled the need for a road link between Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia and was the second bridge to allow this.

Of the various bridges over the Douro River estuary, the Arrábida Bridge is the closest to the estuary.
This bridge was also designed to allow the circulation of pedestrians and, therefore, four lifts were installed, two on each side, which had the capacity for about 25 people. They stopped working for safety reasons.

It is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, symbol of the City, probably the one that in the future will best symbolize the Porto of the 20th century.
It is Heritage in the noblest sense of the word. And it is where new and beautiful perspectives of Porto are often discovered.
It was classified as a National Monument in the year of its 50th anniversary, in 2013.

Did you Know?

Visits to the arch of the Arrábida Bridge began in 2016, this being the only arch of a bridge that can be visited in Europe – 262 are the steps you have to climb to visit it.

The sculptures of S. Lázaro Garden
20 January, 2021 / , ,

In the vicinity of the Porto School of Fine Arts, scattered throughout the São Lázaro Garden, there is a collection of sculptures that you should not miss.

Statue of António da Silva Porto by Barata Feyo

António Carvalho da Silva was a portuguese painter who later adopted the name of his home town as his surname, thus becoming known as Silva Porto.
He studied at the Porto Academy of Fine Arts, did an internship in Paris and Italy, and in 1879 returned to Portugal.
Among others, he received the gold medal of the Portuguese Industrial Exhibition of 1884 and the first medal of the Artistic Guild.
The bronze bust was designed by Barata Feyo, a sculptor and teacher, who had an important pedagogical action as a teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Porto.
He was a major figure in the second generation of portuguese modernist sculptors of the 20th century and sculpted this bust in 1950,

Tenderness Sculpture by Henrique Moreira

The sculpture Tenderness is at the centre of the garden, and recalls the portuguese who died in the Great War of 1914-18.
Henrique Moreira graduated from in Porto Academy of Fine Arts.
He left us vast notable works, such as the decorative Floreira of Avenida dos Aliados. His work has a naturalistic expressiveness, and the trend of Art Deco.
João Cutileiro’s Torso sculpture

João Cutileiro attended the studio of Jorge Barradas and António Duarte as a volunteer and it was with the latter that he had contact with the stone for the first time.
He presented his first solo exhibition in 1951, at the age of 14.
He attended the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, and the Slade School of Art in London.
His themes were love, desire and the fullness of being, whose revelation in the field of nature is celebrated with respect and simplicity.

Marques de Oliveira by Soares dos Reis

Naturalistic painter and art critic, Marques de Oliveira was born in the city of Porto in 1853.
At the Academia Portuense de Belas-Artes, he stood out as one of the best students in the course of Historical Painting.
After a brief stint in Italy, he returned to Porto. He had a remarkable teaching career and introduced open air painting in Portugal with drawing as the basis of all his works. His long teaching career was considered remarkable, and led students to direct contact with nature.

In 1929, two years after his death, Porto paid tribute to him by inaugurating a monument in his honour by his friend and fellow countryman sculptor Soares dos Reis in Jardim de São Lázaro.
The great landscape architect’s haughtiness is supported by an elongated bust. The straight and triangular structure of the face with small angular and impressive touches on the hair, beard and eyebrows.

The fire alarm system, in Porto city, in the 19th century
13 November, 2020 / , ,

– HELP ME, HELP, HELP….

Maria das Dores Bernardes, butcher´s daughter, Bernardo, screamed at the top of her lungs, that her house was on fire and distressed, asking for help from her neighbors, who half-walled , lived with her in other wooden houses in Ribeira do Porto.
The neighbors did what they could with a buckets of water and little else, because there was nothing more to do …

Screams of terror and cries of women were heard, crying out for divine intervention …
It took a few hours for everything to be destroyed and the few goods consumed by the fire.

This story of pure fiction, would have been a situation that would surely have occurred several times in the early years of the 19th century in the city of Porto, where a small fire created chaos in the city and there was no one to help the fires that consumed the small houses. It was necessary to take measures so that these fires did not further aggravate the difficult situation of those who, with very little, managed to survive and fires were the worst of all evils.

There were no firefighters, nor fire-fighting cars, and in the absence of electricity (only invented many years later), only candles and lamps illuminated houses at night, increasing the risk of fires, particularly in the closed urban centers.
The scare was permanent and the risks increased, because the population was increasing – they came from the interior, from Minho and from all regions of the country looking for better living conditions which the new industries of the industrial revolution brought to all these people.
The small houses became more and more crowded and the risk increased.
Something had to be done quickly…
It was there that, by agreement between the representatives of the different masters of the city, the City Council and the Cabido, an innovative solution was sought to calm the populations and reduce the risks of fire.
Eureka! Finally a solution…Everyone was called to go to a fire, wherever part of the city was – everyone would be a volunteer.
A contraption was designed, a “device” capable of warning everyone that there was a fire so that everyone could come to the rescue.

FIRE ALARM SYSTEM

Stored inside an iron box, a lever pulled a protected rope inside an iron pipe that would ring the bell of the Church high up there giving a number of rings on the bell announcing the place of fire, so that the whole population would know where to go to help those in need.

A uniform regulation was created throughout the City and depending on the number of times the Church bell rang, anyone who could go to that place would go. For this purpose, a table was created of the number of chimes that the bell would ring, where the fire would occur according to the places.

So, if the fire occurred in the Sé area, the bell would ring 4 chimes and so on. As soon as the bell rang 3 times, the alarm signalled that the situation was under control and everything could return to normal. This system was then set up in various churches in the 50s, in the 19th century, located at strategic points of the city, and it worked well.

Only years later, in 1875 the Associação dos Bombeiros Voluntários was founded in Porto by a group of influential people in the City, merchants and industrialists who, concerned with safeguarding their goods, decided to put their hands to work, and create the best conditions so that in case of fire the firemen could put out the fires. So, no wonder that influential people in the City and with financial capacity to organize an Associação dos Bombeiros Voluntários had been essential to set in motion an organization that would defend everyone from that common enemy – the fire!

Names such as Alexandre Theodoro Glama, Hugo Kopke, Walter Kendall, Alexander Miller Fleming, were essential in the realization of this need increasingly felt in Porto, installing its first headquarter in Rua do Bonjardim.
Specific wheelbarrows were built with water pumps that were carried in barrels and that could calm the anger of the blazes.

In 1876, the publication “O Bombeiro Portuguez” (The Portuguese Fireman) was created to publicize the activity of the Voluntary Firefighters, which was a fortnightly leaf, where the creation of other machines and techniques for fighting fires was taken into account, as well as other news.

Since it was necessary to increase the number of volunteers, in 1872, notices were placed in the City’s commercial houses for recruitment to make themselves available for this noble and altruistic function.

And here comes the registration as a volunteer of a young man of 19 years, born in Brazil in 1850 from a wealthy family who settled in Porto.

Guilherme Gomes Fernandes, developed a remarkable evolution in the creation of conditions for the Voluntary Firemen of Porto until his death in 1902 in Lisbon, following a septicaemia after a surgery.
He is honoured in a square that carries his name (ancient Santa Teresa Square), where a bust keeps his memory forever.

Well…

As for the “contraptions” they no longer have any reason to exist and to fulfil their role, rusting and almost lost forever, and I say almost, because fortunately, some have been recovered recently and put into operation as at the time they were created, such as the one on the façade of S. Lourenço Church, in the Cathedral, among other cases which it is pleasing to note and continue to protect because they are already part of the history of the City.

Today they no longer play their role of fire alarm, but keep alive the memories of the city that are always worth preserving.

Writers’ route through Porto ( António Nobre )
13 November, 2020 / ,

António Pereira Nobre Portuguese poet, born in Porto on August 16, 1867, at Rua de Santa Catarina, 467-469. Son of wealthy bourgeois, he lived his childhood and adolescence between Leça da Palmeira, Foz do Douro, Póvoa de Varzim, Lixa or Seixo.

He studied in several schools in the Porto and attended the main centres of the bohemian city. He started writing very early and published numerous poems in newspapers and magazines. His first poems date from 15 years of age.

In 1888 he enrolled in the law course of the University of Coimbra, but he did not fit in with the student life of Coimbra, and he was disappointed with the academic environment and university life, and failed twice.

In 1890 he went to Paris, where he met Eça de Queirós, and graduated in Political Science from the Sorbonne in 1895.

It was in the solitude of Paris, and experiencing financial difficulties, that she wrote many of the poems of the poetry collection “Só”, his only published work in life – one of the great landmarks of 19th century Portuguese poetry, and a mandatory reference in Portuguese Literature, which influenced great names of Portuguese modernism such as Fernando Pessoa or Florbela Espanca.

A victim of pulmonary tuberculosis, he died in Foz do Douro, on March 18, 1900, at the age of 32, at the home of his brother Augusto Nobre, a renowned biologist and professor at the University of Porto.

In the middle of the Cordoaria Garden, on 26 March 1927, a bust was inaugurated by the Porto poet, António Nobre, by Tomás Costa.
In a solitary place, we see a beautiful small bronze bust, which immortalizes his face, with its peculiar characteristic smile, sensitive, delicate, sad and melancholic
On a kind of altar, it rests on a marble pedestal with bouquets of flowers, and an allegorical lyre to its poetic inspiration, which is under a granite base with three steps.