Courthouses and Former Prisons

Under the designation of courthouses and former prisons is grouped a set of buildings that materialise, in stone, two of the oldest and most visible functions of Portuguese public power: judging and punishing. For centuries, these functions had neither their own house nor autonomous architecture – they shared the same building as the municipal government, an arrangement that only modernity would undo. To follow this typology is, therefore, to trace the slow separation between administration, justice and prison, and the way in which each of them ultimately claimed its own built language.

The town hall and prison

Until the early 20th century, the municipal buildings typically combined, in a single building, the town hall, municipal administration, the courthouse, the civil registry and the prison. The common formula – town hall and prison – says it all: on the noble floor, the courtroom and council chamber, with windows facing the square; on the ground floor or in the basement, the prison, with small barred openings at street level. The building often opened onto a gallery or arcade, under which fairs and public acts were held, and almost always stood next to the pillory, the other great symbol of municipal jurisdiction.

In a single façade were concentrated the place where decisions were made, the place where judgments were passed and the place where sentences were served: the architecture made visible the unity of local power.

This physical association between municipal power and prison explains the sobriety of most of these buildings. Built in regional masonry – granite in the north, limestone and lime in the south – they largely follow the restraint of plain Mannerist architecture and, later, received Baroque-style façades, crowned by a bell, royal coat of arms and clock. The model is so stable that, from Beira to Alentejo, the same programme is immediately recognisable, repeated with minor variations.

From the Appellate Court to prison architecture

The great exception to this modest scale are the buildings of the Appellate Courts, the kingdom’s higher courts. The most eloquent case is the Prison and Appellate Court of Porto. The court was created in 1581 and initially operated near the Cathedral; a first purpose-built structure, erected in Campo do Olival, collapsed in 1752. The current construction began in 1766, to a design by Eugénio dos Santos e Carvalho, and the first solemn session took place in 1797.

The building is today one of the rarest surviving examples of 18th-century prison architecture in Portugal. It combined the courthouse and prison in the same structure, with cells, infirmary and chapel, and remained in use as a prison until 1974 – almost two centuries of continuous operation. After rehabilitation works directed by Eduardo Souto de Moura and Humberto Vieira, it has housed the Portuguese Photography Centre since 2000, in the heart of Porto’s historic centre. Its preservation allows us to read, in the very distribution of space, the logic of a justice that watched and punished in full view of the city.

The Estado Novo’s Palaces of Justice

The architectural autonomy of the courthouse only consolidated in the 20th century. From the 1940s onwards, the Estado Novo launched a vast programme of Palaces of Justice construction, aimed at providing each judicial district with its own building and affirming the State’s presence in the territory. Architect Raúl Rodrigues Lima was tasked with designing the archetype: a plan organised according to a rigorous “internal services programme”, monumental façade and columned portico, in an austere classicism close to the regime’s official architecture.

This model, replicated in dozens of cities – from Bragança to Almada, from Guarda to Aveiro – definitively removed the courthouse from the municipal building and turned it into a piece of political scenography, where the staircase, portico and statue of Justice staged the solemnity of judgment. At the same time, the prison separated from justice and the town hall, giving rise to autonomous prison establishments. Thus closes a journey of centuries: what began united in a single square façade ended up divided into three distinct architectures, each with its own language and place in the city.