Aveiro: from the convent to the canals: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
A convent, a fish square and the moliceiro docks
Aveiro grew around its water: the walk moves from convents and churches to the old tide mill, the Art Nouveau houses, the docks of the Ria and the square where fish and salt were landed.
The stops
The cathedral sits in a former Dominican convent of medieval foundation, founded in 1423 and rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries; only the church and the line of the old convent garden wall, now a cemetery, survive. The façade has a doorway between twisted columns, with figures of Charity and Hope, and Faith above. Inside the porch stands a late Gothic stone cross carved with scenes of the Passion, which once stood outside, and a copy stands in the square. Across the square is the Convent of Jesus, where Princess Joana lived.
Photo: Xosema — CC BY-SA 4.0 Two women withdrew to a small house on this site around 1458 to 1460, and by 1465 it was a Dominican convent. In 1472 Joana, daughter of King Afonso V, entered it, and she died here in 1490 and was beatified in 1693. Her tomb, a baroque work in polychrome marbles by the royal architect João Antunes, stands in the church choir among gilded woodwork and tiles, and the city turned the convent into a museum after taking it over in 1911.
Photo: LetíciaVDantasM — CC BY 4.0 A Franciscan convent was founded here in 1524, built at the wish of João Nunes, the town's judge, and his wife Isabel da Costa. The present church was begun in 1677, and its tiles come from the Coimbra workshop of Vital Rifarto, made in the second quarter of the 18th century. When the religious orders were abolished in 1834 the church passed to the Third Order, and the convent buildings had many uses, even as a military barracks.
Photo: Vitor Oliveira from Torres Vedras, PORTUGAL — CC BY-SA 2.0 The convent was built in 1657 on a former palace, and the first Carmelite sisters arrived from Lisbon convents in 1658. The church was begun in 1704 and the last work was finished in 1738. Inside, gilded woodwork in Baroque and Rococo styles covers the walls and ceiling, with blue and white tiles attributed to António Vital Rifarto of Coimbra. The last Carmelite died in 1879, and in 1905 most of the convent was demolished to widen the square.
Photo: Alexkom000 — CC BY 4.0 The town council bought the land for a theatre in 1857, but work stopped for a long time, and it took a company set up in 1879 to finish it. The Dona Maria II theatre company opened it in 1881. It closed in 1947, reopened in 1949 after a major renovation, and a new auditorium was inaugurated in October 2003. It stands on the Praça da República, beside the Town Hall and the Misericórdia church.
Photo: Alegna13 — CC BY-SA 3.0 Work on this church began in 1600 under Gregório Lourenço, with the Casa do Despacho finished in 1608, the nave and main portal in 1623 and the chancel in 1653. The 17th-century interior is lined with tiles from Lisbon, while the façade was only covered in tiles in 1876. The church served as the cathedral when the Diocese of Aveiro was created.
Photo: Lídia Maria Faria — CC BY-SA 4.0 This began as a tide mill: a document of 8 January 1406 from King John I mentions it, allowing the royal clerk to set up mills on a sea inlet that would grind with seawater. The building still stands on arches over piles in the waters of the Ria, and its façade mixes neoclassical and Art Nouveau details. In 1830 the founder of the Vista Alegre factory bought the ruins, and the Fernando Caldeira industrial drawing school was inaugurated here on 3 November 1903, with a second floor designed by Francisco Augusto Silva Rocha.
Photo: Duca696 — CC BY-SA 3.0 Look at how this three-storey Art Nouveau building is dressed: the whole façade is covered in hand-painted tiles of lilies with green stems, in pink, purple and red. The panels date from 1913 and came from the Fonte Nova factory. The curved, cut-out crown at the top goes with the flowing lines of the window frames below.
Photo: GFreihalter — CC BY-SA 3.0 Mário Belmonte Pessoa had this Art Nouveau house built in 1907, to designs by the architects Francisco Augusto da Silva Rocha and Ernesto Korrodi. By 2004 it was badly decayed, and the city council bought it and turned it into the Museu Arte Nova in 2008. It has been classed as a Property of Public Interest since 1997.
Photo: Concierge.2C — CC BY-SA 3.0 Aveiro is known as the Portuguese Venice for its canals and boats. Tourist moliceiros set off from several docks along this garden, beside the Canal Central and the Canal das Pirâmides. The moliceiro began as a working boat that gathered moliço, the seagrass used as fertiliser on the area's thin sandy soils, and it has become a symbol of the Ria de Aveiro. The garden has been a public space for at least 500 years, and the city's first pillory was set up here in the 16th century.
Photo: jad99 from Graz, Austria — CC BY-SA 2.0 In the early 20th century this square at the edge of the Canal dos Botirões was the main place where fish and salt were landed and sold. In its centre stand a fountain built in 1876 and the Mercado do Peixe, the old Mercado José Estevão of 1910, with the fish market on the ground floor and a restaurant upstairs.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0 This small hexagonal chapel was built in 1714 and honours Saint Gonçalo, who is credited with the power to cure bone ailments and settle marital problems. On the Sunday closest to 10 January the neighbourhood holds its festival, when people who made vows pay them by throwing cavacas, dry sugar-coated cakes, from the walkway around the dome to a crowd below. The crowd catches them with all sorts of utensils.
Photo: Paulo Tavares — Public domain Opened in May 2006, this steel footbridge crosses the Canal de São Roque and the Canal dos Botirões, two channels of the Aveiro lagoon. Its designers, Luís Viegas and Domingos Moreira, gave it an unusual circular shape, held up at three banks and hung from a mast. It is also known as the Ponte do Laço.
Photo: Vitor Oliveira from Torres Vedras, PORTUGAL — CC BY-SA 2.0
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