Lamego Museum and ... Snow!

Weather Forecast - “Moderate rain (total 18mm), heaviest on Fri morning. Freeze-thaw conditions. Winds decreasing.” Well the truth is that it has rained hard almost nonstop, all day for 2 days, and yes, we did see hail and snow. On Saturday, we will see the sun! Apparently Storm Gabriel has been creating havoc all over Europe and now Storm Helena follows.

Our first rainy day in Lamego was spent doing indoor things - the laundry, buying groceries, cooking, catching up with emails. Today, we saw a bit of sun so we decided to walk to the tourist office and the museum. Just as we neared the tourist office, there was a huge crack of thunder, lightening and the skies opened. We just made it to the office in the nick of time. The people there were very helpful and gave us lots of ideas of what to do, even in bad weather.

We waited for a little break in the rain and ran to the Museum.

The beautiful building that was once the bishop’s palace (1773) now houses one of the most carefully kept museums in inland Portugal. We enjoyed it for two reasons. First, for the displays and second, for a chance to walk around the inside of this beautiful former palace. The building was renovated in the middle of the 18th Century and turned into a museum in 1918.

On the ground floor, there are a series of rooms devoted to archaeology, displaying a number of medieval tombs, a beautiful medieval stone cross and various stones bearing the coats of arms of Portuguese families.

On the second floor, we saw several paintings done by a famous Portuguese painter called Vasco Fernandes (Grão Vasco) and a collection of huge Flemish tapestries.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the bishop of Lamego, commissioned a large altarpiece which was to be used to decorate the cathedral chancel. Of the 20 panels originally painted by Grão Vasco, only five survived. They have been cleaned up and are displayed in one of the rooms.

The tapestries date from the same period as Grão Vasco's paintings and were created in Brussels. Nobles and clergy used huge tapestries like these to decorate the interior of their palaces and make them more comfortable. Four of the tapestries telling the Greek myth story of Oedipus. Such attention into detail! We have no clue how they were made or the time taken to make them. They are something to see.

Back on the first level, we checked out the antique furniture and the old carriages and litters. One room had some lovely, colourful azulejos (painted tiles). These colourful 17th panels, rescued from a Lisbon palace, are extraordinary. The man at the tourist office told us that we had to go visit the railway station to see an amazing wall of these tiles.

All in all, we had an interesting visit while learning about Lamego’s history on a cold and rainy day. We hurriedly ran up the hill to our apartment and luckily were able to avoid another downpour.Read more