Cultural places in Portugal

Museum • Cascais, Lisboa

In Cascais, almost above the Santa Marta cove, the Casa-Museu de Santa Maria seems to rise from the rock and the light of the sea. Raul Lino designed it in 1902 for Jorge O’Neill, as a gift for his daughter Maria Teresa, in one of the earliest moments of a body of work that already suggests his idea of the Portuguese house, with Mediterranean and Moorish echoes. For about a century it remained a private residence; today, as part of the Museum Quarter, it still keeps that intimate character, more like a lived-in house than a small palace. The interior surprises with its decorative richness: the Hall of Arches, the terrace facing the water, the tiles designed by the architect and, above all, the late seventeenth-century panels brought from a chapel in Frielas give the whole place a quiet and very distinctive beauty. Between windows open to the Atlantic, painted wood and silence, one senses that this house was not meant to dominate the landscape, but to converse with it.

Palace • Cascais, Lisboa

In the Citadel of Cascais, the palace shows how a place of maritime defence was transformed into a royal summer residence and later into a site of state memory. The former governor’s house of the fortress, part of a complex whose story begins in 1488, was adapted by King Luís in 1870 for the royal family. From then on, Cascais changed in scale: the court began to spend time in the town, King Carlos deepened its bond with the sea and, in 1878, one of Portugal’s earliest experiments with electric light illuminated the palace battery. Even today, between the courtyard of honour, the view over the bay, the Arab Room inspired by the Alhambra and the wood panelling from the time of Carlos, one senses that unusual blend of fortress, palace and lived residence. After the proclamation of the Republic, the building passed to the Presidency and, after rehabilitation in the twenty-first century, finally opened to the public.