CASA GUERRA JUNQUEIRO

Located in the Rua de D. Hugo, this building, whose architect is unknown, is an example of 19th century civil architecture. It was commissioned by Domingos Barbosa, the magistral canon of the Sé Cathedral of Porto.

The house was acquired in 1934 by the daughter of the poet Guerra Junqueiro. In 1940 she donated it to Porto City Council, together with the poet’s artistic estate, and it was restored by the architect Alcino Soutinho and inaugurated as a museum in 1942. In 2017 it was subject to refurbishment works coordinated by the architect Camilo Rebelo, as part of modernisation and improvement works in the municipal museums.

Station 10 of the Porto City Museum, reconstitutes the living environment and the original layout of the objects in the poet Guerra Junqueiro’s house in Porto. It exhibits collections of ceramics, metal, jewellery, sculpture, furniture and textiles, from periods between the 15th and 19th centuries. With a focus on decorative arts, each object highlights a specific interest, evokes its respective era and indicates its genealogy.

Besides being part of the sound axis, common to all the stations of the Porto City Museum, the Casa Guerra Junqueiro is one of the key sites in the romanticism axis. Guerra Junqueiro, considered to be the poet of the Republic, worked between the romantic and the realist school. The house also explores the relation of this period of history with the city and the contemporary era: the Cabinet of Drawing hosts new exhibitions every quarter, programming artists from several generations dedicated to the erratic or systematic practice of drawing, viewed as a way of projecting and imagining new ideas.

Images—Atlas: António Alves and Fernando Noronha (Porto City Museum) and photos from the archive of the Porto City Museum Collection.