Culture

Archaeological findings deliver cultural highlights from to West to the East in Porto’s Museu da Cidade

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The former water reservoir of the Pasteleira Park is the first station of the Museu da Cidade, to the West, in the city of Porto. The Reservatório, designed by Alexandre Alves Costa and Sérgio Fernandez, gathers artefacts, traces and pieces found in excavations or collected in buildings and monuments of the city. As of today, this Museum station is open to the public.

“A Reading machine of the city”, this is what Mayor Rui Moreira called it, during a visit to the place last Saturday, 10 July, adding that “it also points to the future and to what it means to build a city”. The Mayor of Porto City Hall recalled how this building, deactivated since 1998, showed the “best location to start the project ‘Museu da Cidade’”.

“This is the westernmost station of the Museu da Cidade of the city map, a 1250 square metre exhibition space, which grants a new life and dignity to this wonderful park”, affirmed Rui Moreira, furthering that “architects were able to make this reservoir an observatory as well”, as vistas open up around every corner.

The Mayor also recalled that the Extensão do Douro is yet “another achievement” and pledged to “a comprehensive programme that expands the scrutiny over the territory”, adding that the Museu da Cidade “is a museum under construction”, at city level, and estimates the opening of further extensions.

This museum space to the west is also the starting point of a cycle that “commences in the soil, ranging through layers, to go back to the land, in the last station of the map of the Museu da Cidade, to the easternmost point, which will be in the Bonjóia – the future Extensão da Natureza, which will be a sowing set”, explained Rui Moreira.

As regards the Reservatório, the Artistic Director of the Museu da Cidade, Nuno Faria ensured that it was his [Rui Moreira] vision and audacity that recovered this unique equipment to the city’s cultural vison”.

“The public may now start to grasp the vocation of the Museum that we wish to build, the range of the connections it involves, the network we wish to activate, the issues it wants to raise and debate or reflect upon”, affirmed Nuno Faria, who took the occasion to “thank the opportunity that is given to us, in such difficult times, in which we continue to create these structures that we believe are essential to our daily lives and to our future”.

Getting to know the city form the Palaeolithic to the Contemporary Ages

The archaeological station of the Reservatório is today a museum, a place of work and mediation towards a living reservation, which, as Nuno Faria put it “offers multiple stimuli and avenues”.

The Reservatório is divided in different places, such as the Casa Guerra Junqueiro, the archaeological site of the Rua Dom Hugo, the Casa Infante, the Castelo da Foz, just to mention a few, where excavations of the 20th century and of the 21st century have revealed re-population from diverse eras, since the Contemporary Era to Palaeolithic, and which enable to assess the city’s evolution, both in time and space.

The Reservatório is open to the public.

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