Museums and Palaces

Camilo’s House – Museum
Not having, however, the main characteristics that define the residence of the “brasileiro de torna viagem” (“the returning back Brazilian”), S. Miguel de Seide house was built around 1830, with the money saved in Brazil by Pinheiro Alves, first Ana Plácido’s husband.

After his death, for which contributed a lot the sorrow caused by his wife and Camilo’s absolution in Porto High Court of Justice, for the crime of adultery of which he had accused them, the writer settled down in the yellow house during the winter of 1863, where until the fatidic day of the 1st June 1890, in a disturbed process of literary creation and at the expenses of his own tragedy and of others, he wrote a great deal of his work where the most remarkable and authentic features of the 19th century Portugal and the Portuguese soul of every epoch can be found.

After the fire of 1915, the building was reconstructed and transformed, in 1922, in the Camilian Museum. With its rebuilding, however, the house would become very adulterated, as the installation of Seide parish elementary school in the groundfloor and the technical requisites that, for that purpose, it had to undergo, changed some of its fundamental characteristics.

Works undertaken in the ‘50s would restores its original draft, allowing to visitors, since then, an inner disposition, very similar to the residence inhabited by the writer, and recreating with great fidelity the atmosphere that could be felt there in the 19.th century.

Considered as the great living memorial of Camilo Castelo Branco and one of the most well-known and prestigious House-Museums in Portugal, that one of the Novelist is a permanent institution at the service of the community and its development, the main goals of which is to gather, research, preserve and, very particularly, to exhibit for study, education and cultural purposes, the material evidences of his life and work.

Today and forever, it is tried that every visit may become, not a pilgrimage, but a renewed invitation to Camilo’s reading and a bet of hope in the perpetuity of the Portuguese culture and language, of which his work constitutes such a singular assertion.

Camilo's House - Center of Studies
In order to dynamyze Camilo’s House didactic and pedagogic action and render profitable the rich institution patrimony, in the fields of bibliography, manuscript documentation, most of it autographs, iconography and plastic arts, Famalicão Municipality promoted the construction of a vast building, which includes an auditorium, reading and temporary exhibitions room, offices, stores and coffee house, among other rooms, in an ample and beautiful complex conceived by the architect Álvaro Siza Vieira.

Located near the Museum, but without touching its historical and natural environment, the Center of Studies accommodations allow the transformation of this symbolic place in an irradiation center which, having as the first and main subject Camilo’s figure and work, aims above all the promotion of a large project of cultural and scientific intervention in behalf of the Portuguese culture and language, as an essential reality and privileged basis, not only of our identity, but also, and overall, of its affirmation in the large space of Lusophony and in the European Union countries.