Museums and Palaces

Memorial to Refugees and to Consul Aristides Sousa Mendes

The Memorial to Refugees and to Consul Aristides Sousa Mendes, inaugurated in 2017, keeps alive the memory of a recent past of closed borders, where an entry visa to Portugal meant a life saved. Thirty thousand of these, including 10,000 to Jews, were granted by the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux during World War II, Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885-1954), who was remembered as a "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem in 1966.

The facility is housed in two old warehouses attached to the railway station in Vilar Formoso, an important border town in Portugal, which was the gateway to a neutral country in the War for refugees to the horrors of the Holocaust. Testimonies described the town as welcoming, where migrants were welcomed with giant pots of soup, bread and accommodation. The two warehouses of the railway station are now connected by a dark body, which contrasts with the white of the exterior walls of both buildings, designed as the fragment of a swastika.

Six exhibition clusters are presented to the visitor: "People like us", "The beginning of the nightmare", "The journey", "Vilar Formoso, Border of Peace", "Through the lands of Portugal" and "The departure". In the first warehouse, it is possible to see images of Jewish families walking or playing in the streets and parks of Vienna. Throughout the visit there are videos, photographs, texts and posters that testify the transformations in Germany and in Europe, since Hitler came to power, in 1933, until 1940, when Portugal received the great wave of migrants. In the second warehouse, the only one that already existed at the time of the war, the pale blue walls recreate the blue sky described with emotion by those who managed to reach Vilar Formoso.