History

In the year 1524, a certain Álvaro Vaz Ribeiro, the Elder, living in the city of Porto, wrote the following note in a book he owned (1):

“Jesus Mary, On 25 April, Saturday, I received my wife Beatriz Eanes de Escapa, daughter of João de Sam Miguel and of Beatriz Afonso de Escapa, in Porto, in 1524.”

With this note, Álvaro Vaz began the family tradition of recording the most important events in the family’s life—births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths—and, from time to time, earthquakes or voyages to India…

With this marriage, Álvaro Vaz and Beatriz began a lineage whose ancestral home would be the Casa de Nossa Senhora da Piedade, in Ponte de Lima. But it would be their heir, their son Gaspar de São Miguel, who would be the first in the family to settle in Ponte de Lima, where he married and where his children were born:

“On 8 July 1557 I became betrothed, and on the 24th of the same month I married my wife Catarina de Mogueimas, for many years to serve Our Lord, in the church of Santa Maria of Ponte de Lima,”

writes Gaspar de São Miguel in the same book. And immediately after:

“In Ponte de Lima, on 9 August 1558, my first son Álvaro Vaz, the Younger, was born.”

Today, eleven generations later, it falls to their descendants to preserve and cherish these old walls, and within them to keep alive the memories of the hopes, joys, and achievements of their forebears who lived here—“for as long as the world endures”—as was the Founder’s wish.

Since 1983, the “ensemble formed by the Casa do Cruzeiro, chapel, and gate”, in the parish of Arca, Ponte de Lima, has been classified as a Property of Public Interest (Decree No. 8/83, Official Gazette, Series I, No. 19, 24-01-1983).

The property “is characterised by the sobriety and simplicity of its lines, with only the main façade standing out, in a rising rhythm of horizontal lines from the cornice of the wall to that of the chapel’s pediment and the frieze that divides the second from the third storey of the residential block.” IGESPAR also highlights its “harmonious setting: it stands at the end of a broad avenue that begins at the municipal road, with a stone cross that seems to be the origin of the house’s name.”

The technicians of the (then) IPPAR placed special importance on the solution—so typical of Northern Baroque—of orienting the house’s façade towards the stone cross at the entrance to the property, creating an axis formed by the carriageway: a wide avenue lined with olive trees.

These trees take on a sacred symbolic character, as they provide the oil to light the altar of the Blessed Sacrament. It is this setting that gives the ensemble its special meaning: the location of the cross at the entrance, “by the beginning of the access avenue to the Chapel and House, is part of a logic of ordering and hierarchy of spaces and routes […], a logic now understood as an inseparable element of a well-defined building typology, so characteristic and striking of Alto Minho.”