Projects
Initiatives to preserve, study, and share the heritage of Casa do Cruzeiro.
Over the years we have opened the house to cultural initiatives, organised and digitised our archive, and supported restoration and conservation work. These projects aim to keep memories alive and ensure this heritage is passed on to future generations.
Open to the public (September 2024)
In September 2024, Casa do Cruzeiro opened to the public for one weekend and welcomed around one hundred visitors, in a pioneering initiative coordinated by Universidade Nova de Lisboa. We will make every effort to repeat this initiative, which also involved students from Ponte de Lima Secondary School who volunteered to support and guide the visits.
Archiving, transcription and digitisation
In 2023 we published a recipe book compiled between 1835 and 1865 by João Coelho de Castro Villasboas e Sá (the last morgado through his marriage to Maria José de Couros Carneiro de Vasconcelos), annotated and commented by Ana Marques Pereira.
The house has been cataloguing, typing and digitising family documents, including letters and photographs. In doing so, we hope to keep alive the voices that have echoed here over the centuries and to share the passions, opinions and interests they carried.
Organisation and preservation of the family archive
Digitisation of letters, photographs and other records
Sharing stories and memories connected to the house
Restoration and conservation
Caring for a house with four hundred years of history is a significant responsibility. Casa de Nossa Senhora da Piedade works to protect both tangible and intangible heritage — keeping memories, traditions and stories alive, alongside the physical elements that carry historic value.
CHAPEL ALTARPIECE
In partnership with the School of Arts at the Catholic University of Portugal, the house welcomed a restoration team in the summer of 2011, led by Professor Eulália Subtil. The work consolidated the altarpiece by replacing and reinforcing the most affected structural elements. In parallel, the gilded woodcarving was cleaned and its gold stabilised, metallic elements were cleaned, and missing components were replaced. The intervention also revealed faux-marble finishes hidden beneath successive repainting, and evidence of an earlier altar later replaced by a rococo altarpiece — possibly connected to a wedding celebrated in this chapel in 1762.
OUR LADY OF PIETY (SCULPTURE)
Showing signs of damage caused by wood-boring insects, the 17th-century sculpture of Our Lady of Piety was restored in Lisbon in 2010 as part of a final-degree internship, by two students from the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar (Ana Neto and Rosário Loureiro). The sculpture shares stylistic similarities with another preserved at the Museum of the Third Order in Ponte de Lima, suggesting it may be by the same author.
FURNITURE
During the summer of 2012, the house hosted a furniture-restoration specialist from Madeiras e Maneiras, who spent a month cleaning, conserving and restoring around twenty pieces of furniture. Other pieces were entrusted to the School of Arts at the Catholic University of Portugal (Porto), to be restored by students during the Restoration course.