Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida & the Mayor Who Built the Avenue
Why is it significant?
Pause outside number 41 on Rua Rosa Araújo, a dignified nineteenth-century mansion set back behind railings. It looks like a family home, and it was: the house of a man who spent decades filling it with treasures, and then gave the whole lot away.
Key Facts
| Place | Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida & the Mayor Who Built the Avenue |
|---|---|
| Address | Rua Rosa Araújo 41, 1250-194 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.72170, -9.14910 |
| Part of Walk | Up the Avenida da Liberdade: Lisbon's Grand Boulevard from Restauradores to Parque Eduardo VII |
| Generated | Generated |
Pause outside number 41 on Rua Rosa Araújo, a dignified nineteenth-century mansion set back behind railings. It looks like a family home, and it was: the house of a man who spent decades filling it with treasures, and then gave the whole lot away.
António Medeiros e Almeida, born in 1895, was a businessman who made his fortune in the first half of the twentieth century and spent much of it, with great discipline, on art. He bought this house in the 1940s and lived here with his wife. He set up a foundation so that the house and everything in it would pass to the public, and the museum opened in 2001, some fifteen years after his death.
Inside you find Chinese porcelain, English and Portuguese silver, French furniture, paintings, and above all clocks and watches, from tiny enamelled pocket watches to tall ticking cases, among the finest collections of timepieces in Portugal. Rooms are kept as they were lived in, so you walk through it as a guest rather than a visitor, and the quiet is broken only by the ticking.
Now look at the street sign. José Gregório da Rosa Araújo was the mayor of Lisbon who pushed the Avenida da Liberdade through in 1879. Critics attacked the cost and wept for the old garden; property owners fought him; the newspapers mocked him. He pressed on regardless. Without him, there would be no avenue, no roundabout at the top, and none of the northern districts that grew beyond it.
There is a neat connection between the two men. One gave Lisbon a public boulevard at the cost of a private garden; the other turned a private house into a public treasure. Both believed the city deserved more than it had. Walk back to the avenue and follow it to the very top, where traffic swirls around a giant roundabout and a statue on a tall column looks straight down toward the river.