Historic Centre of Guimarães

On one of the city’s walls, a famous inscription sums up its identity: “Portugal was born here”. It is in Guimarães that tradition places the birth of the kingdom, in the twelfth century, and it is its remarkably well-preserved medieval historic centre that UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2001.

The cradle of the nation

At the foot of the castle, around 1109, Afonso Henriques is said to have been born, the man who would proclaim himself the first king of Portugal. The castle and the neighbouring church of São Miguel anchor the city in its founding. Nearby rises the Palace of the Dukes of Bragança, of the fifteenth century — a seigneurial residence of Burgundian inspiration, restored in the twentieth century to serve as an official palace.

The city that survived

The value recognised by UNESCO is not, however, primarily monumental: it is urban. Guimarães preserves a medieval and early-modern fabric of exceptional authenticity — streets, squares such as the Largo da Oliveira, houses with wooden balconies and porches, in which the evolution of a city from the Middle Ages can be read without major ruptures.

The UNESCO committee singled out Guimarães as an example of the evolution of building techniques and materials from the medieval period to the nineteenth century — a city that is, in itself, a treatise on the history of vernacular architecture.

A model of rehabilitation

Guimarães is also a case study in urban conservation. The rehabilitation of its historic centre, carried out since the 1980s with rigour and with the participation of its inhabitants, is often cited as an example of how to recover an old centre while keeping it inhabited — and not turning it into a stage set for visitors. For this it received, in 1985, the Europa Nostra Award.

In 2012, Guimarães was European Capital of Culture. The choice confirmed what the city had already demonstrated: that a place can honour its condition as a cradle without letting itself be fossilised by it.