Casa de Mateus

Between October 2025 and March 2026 the house, the chapel, the wine-press house and the forecourt were surveyed by terrestrial laser scanning and photogrammetry. The point cloud comes from 439 stations, registered in PT-TM06/ETRS89 (EPSG:3763) and reduced to a 1.5 cm grid, which leaves 150 million points. On that basis three buildings were modelled as IFC4 (house, chapel and wine-press house), together with a model of 89 spaces, all georeferenced through IfcMapConversion. A photographic campaign on 19 March 2026 (1,998 images) served close-range photogrammetry; among its products is the textured mesh of the chapel and its high altarpiece²⁸.

The survey has limits, and some of them show in the drawings on this page:

1. The roofs are mostly missing from the cloud. A scanner standing on the ground and in the courtyards cannot see the upper slope of a roof; where the site plan shows ceilings instead of tiles, that is why.
2. Only 89 of the 439 stations recorded colour. Points from the others are in shades of grey derived from return intensity, and in the sections the two appear side by side.
3. The house was open to visitors during the campaign. People moving through it remain in the cloud as translucent figures, mostly around the staircases.
4. The model below is a sample: one point per 15 cm cube on the buildings and per 25 cm cube on the ground around them, with the tree canopies removed, 2.17 million points in all. The full survey has 150 million and lives in the HBIM viewer with the IFC models.

The four drawings below were not drawn. They are orthographic projections of the cloud, computed point by point from 38 to 118 million points each, with no perspective and no retouching. Relief comes from depth shading (eye-dome lighting); colour is what the scanner recorded. Where a drawing cuts, points within 12 to 14 cm of the plane are shown in red, and whatever lies beyond the cut fades out, as on a survey sheet.

It is worth saying what these are not: there is no draughtsman’s interpretation here, no closing of lines, no decision about what is wall and what is furniture. A wardrobe against a wall reads as wall. That is, they are measurement documents, and that is their use: what they show is there.

The plan is a U with a transverse wing that splits the space between the wings into two courtyards: to the west, the courtyard of honour, open to the forecourt; to the east, an inner service courtyard. SIPA calls the plan «pouco comum» (uncommon) and points to the solution for the courtyard of honour: a low stone wall with a balustrade closes it without closing it, a compromise between the open and the closed U that does not cut across the main front¹. Measured in the cloud, the house covers about 60 by 33 metres, and the main front does not face exactly west but west-north-west, at an azimuth of about 295 degrees.

The façades have two storeys, rendered and whitewashed, with pilaster quoins and granite dressings on friezes, cornices and window frames. The height the house lacks comes from the tall, swelling pinnacles set on the line of the pilasters, and from the chimneys¹. The central wing of the main front carries the decoration: a crest panel with the quartered arms (Álvares, Mourão and Botelho), an undulating balustrade following the curved cornices, two allegorical figures, and a two-armed staircase rising to the door of the main floor¹.

The house is also a social diagram. The ground floor was entirely for service (granaries, stables, wine stores, servants’ rooms, kitchen) and connects with the main floor only by a narrow stair next to the kitchen; the courtyard staircases rise outside¹. On the main floor the rooms open into one another through aligned doors, and from the first to the last the landscape is in view. The plan D. José Maria drew at the end of the eighteenth century still locates the archive next to the dining room and the passage hall to the chapel gallery; the 3rd Count of Vila Real later rearranged the bedrooms of the north and east wings¹.

Structurally it is a house of load-bearing rubble-stone walls in two leaves with a clay-and-gravel core, chestnut ceilings, pine floors and a timber roof with clay tiles¹. It was this two-leaf wall that deformed over time: in 2000 leaning and cracking were measured, and in 2001 and 2002 the DGEMN tied the leaves together with bonded anchors and reinforced the render of the façades^1,20. The 2025 cloud is therefore also a reference state against which future movement can be measured.

No known document names the designer of the Casa de Mateus. The name of Nicolau Nasoni (1691–1773), an Italian architect born in Tuscany who settled in Porto in 1725, comes in through stylistic and circumstantial argument:

• Robert C. Smith (1966) attributed the design to him on stylistic grounds; according to Património Cultural, he limited Nasoni’s part to the conception, with an execution that departs from the drawings^13,3.
• SIPA places the intervention in 1739 to 1743, the period to which it is «geralmente» (generally) attributed, lists Nasoni as «atribuído» (attributed), and compares the central wing with the Palácio do Freixo and the Clérigos church¹.
• Património Cultural adds the circumstance: Nasoni is documented in 1739 at the church of Santa Eulália da Cumieira, belonging to the same estate, at a time when it is not known what he was doing before returning to Porto. It also notes that more recently the name of António Pereira, a Porto architect who is thought to have worked with Nasoni, has been linked to the house^3,14.
• The Casa de Mateus Foundation presents Nasoni as the author⁵.

Therefore the wording that seems right to us is SIPA’s own: attributed to Nasoni, not documented. For the chapel, the execution is more secure, by the master mason José Álvares do Rego, but not the design^1,6.

The chapel of Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres stands north of the house, detached, linked to the main floor by a bridge on an arch. It replaced an older chapel that was cramped and built against the house, and reused from it the painted coffered ceiling of the sacristy and the altarpiece, both Mannerist¹. The inscription on the front, «D. LUD. A. SOUSA AUGM. PERF. ET CORONAT. 1750», gives the year and the name of D. Luís António; the Foundation dates the inauguration to 1759^1,6.

The front looks taller than it is: it has the eaves height of the house, but the tablet with its stepped pediment, the aligned openings and the coat of arms carry it upward¹. Measured in the cloud, the cross stands about 24 metres above the west forecourt. Behind it is the bell tower on the axis, uncommon in the district, which SIPA links to the «Escola de Braga» (Braga school). Inside, the nave is covered by a dome with a lantern, and the high altarpiece is carved and painted in faux marble. Buried in the chapel are D. Luís António, D. José Maria, brought from Père-Lachaise in 1965, the 3rd Count of Vila Real, the founder of the Foundation and his son^6,1.

The gardens seen today are mostly twentieth-century, but they follow the axis the house gives them: the sequence of doors in the central wing continues eastward through the parterre, through the clipped tunnel over the stairs and along a pergola on granite posts shaped as obelisks, which SIPA considers possibly the only survivals of the original garden².

Tradition credits the first garden to the archdeacon Diogo Álvares Botelho Mourão, brother of the builder^1,8. In the 1930s the Countess of Mangualde remade the box parterre to the east, to a design by Gomes de Amorim; in 1948 the tunnel was planted over the east stairs, António Lino designed the three tanks of the water garden and Paulo Bensliman the box parterres to the south; in 1960 Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles made the first plan for the estate, from which came the great pool in front of the main façade^1,2. It is this reflecting pool, neo-Baroque in outline and with a grassed bank inside its rim, that gives the front a grandeur a parterre would not, as SIPA notes². In the cloud the pool is an empty rectangle: water does not return the laser.

Two notes on names. The Foundation calls the more than eighty trees of the tunnel Mexican cedars, which points to the Mexican cypress (Cupressus lusitanica); SIPA speaks of clipped cypresses^8,2. And the reclining female figure in the pool since 1981 is by João Cutileiro, although SIPA writes José^8,1.

Dates with sources. Where the sources disagree, the entry says so and refers to the section below.

According to the Foundation, the house was lived in by twelve generations of the same family until 1970⁵. The archive holds documents from 1488 onward, arranged by the successive administrators of the house^1,22; the library has more than six thousand titles⁷.

The best-known object in the library is the edition of The Lusiads that D. José Maria had printed in Paris in 1817 by Firmin Didot. A diplomat in Sweden, Denmark, France and Russia, he spent four years preparing it and gave the copies away himself. The Foundation speaks of one copy on vellum and two hundred and ten others; SIPA of one on vellum and ten on paper^7,1. The house also keeps documents, proofs and plates of the edition.

Since 1970 the house has belonged to a private foundation recognised as a public-interest body in 1971, which runs the museum, the gardens, a working winery and a cultural programme: the International Music Meetings, begun in the late 1970s under Gustav and Marie Leonhardt, the D. Diniz Prize since 1980, a poetry translation seminar since 1990, and artists’ residencies^10,23. In 2023 the museum and park had 111,131 visitors¹².

In 1942 Sogrape, the company of Fernando van Zeller Guedes, launched a rosé named after the estate, with a drawing of the house on the label^11,25. The Foundation says D. Francisco de Sousa Botelho de Albuquerque took part in creating it; the brand credits Guedes alone^11,24.

The story goes, and is often repeated, that the owner was offered so much per bottle and chose a single payment instead. There are at least three published versions, with different figures (a premium of 30 or 40 per cent on the estate’s grapes), all by wine writers and none with a document behind it^25,26,27. We record it for what it is: a story, not a fact.

SIPA records 29 interventions between 1949 and 2003. The chart counts them by decade and by who carried them out: the Vila Real municipality, the Directorate-General for National Buildings and Monuments (DGEMN) and the Foundation itself¹.

There is a visible change of hands. Until the late 1980s it is the DGEMN that deals with termites, woodworm, the roofs and a cornice that fell in 1979; from 1985 onward it is mostly the Foundation, under agreements with the Secretary of State for Culture, that restores storerooms, the old kitchen, the oil press and the distillery as artists’ residences. The structural consolidation of 2001 and 2002 is the DGEMN’s again, after the LNEC study of defects in 1996^1,19.

Nine points on which the sources consulted disagree, or where the common statement has no document behind it:

1. Authorship. Nicolau Nasoni is a stylistic attribution (Smith, 1966; SIPA); Património Cultural also mentions António Pereira; the Foundation treats Nasoni as certain^13,1,3,5.
2. Completion of the house. In November 1743 the work was well advanced; the Foundation gives 1744 as the end; Património Cultural does not know when it began^1,5,3.
3. The chapel. The inscription says 1750, the Foundation dates the inauguration to 1759; the 1743 request for a licence is by António José according to the Foundation and by D. Luís António according to SIPA^1,6.
4. The 1817 Lusiads. One copy on vellum and 210 on paper (Foundation) or one and 10 (SIPA)^7,1.
5. The sculptor of the pool. João Cutileiro (Foundation); SIPA writes José Cutileiro, who was a diplomat and writer^8,1.
6. The pool. Built in the 1950s (Foundation) or finished in 1963 (SIPA)^8,1.
7. The Foundation. Established on 3 December 1970 (Foundation); Património Cultural writes 1971, which is the year of its public-interest status^9,3,10.
8. The label. The single payment in place of a royalty is a story with no published document^25,26,27.
9. The extent of the listing. The 1910 decree lists the palace; the record for the gardens describes them as only partly within the protection zone, and we did not find the text of the decree to see whether it names the chapel and the gardens^3,2.

The Casa de Mateus has been a National Monument since the decree of 16 June 1910 and lies within the special protection zone of the Alto Douro Wine Region, a World Heritage site, though not within the inscribed property^3,4. SIPA has two records for it, the palace (IPA.00005990) and the gardens (IPA.00007011); Património Cultural has record 71128.

In the comparison of the registers of Portugal, France and Spain we measure what each record contains. The palace’s is among the fullest in SIPA: of the 860 National Monument records, its description is the 47th longest and its list of interventions the 51st.