Museums and Palaces

The Espaço Memória e Fronteira is one of the most interesting museums in Melgaço. Located at the old municipal slaughterhouse, which was restyled and expanded in 2007, this museum approaches the municipality’s contemporary history, specially the emigration and the smuggling themes.

Along its rooms, we are taken to the 60s and 70s world of illegal emigration, learning all its moments, from its causes, the preparation of the journey and the journey itself, to the arrival and the life on the refuge country. It’s a perfect social portrait of the hundreds of departed sons of these lands, and the effects of this exodus on the municipality.

The smuggling that caused so many of them to live clandestinely is also portrayed. We highlight the documented real testimonies that take us back to the times that people went abroad “at jump”. A museum made of real people memories.

Obviously, it also has a cabinet for supporting emigrants and immigrants.