Silves Town Council today formally took custody of the documentary and archival collection of the freshly-opened Cork Museum, following the signing of a donation agreement by the company that acquired the property, 16 years after the museum shut its doors.
The Cork Museum, housed in the former Fábrica do Inglês, reopened on 11 July after 16 years behind closed doors, following the acquisition of the property by Erick de Vlieger, who has lived in the Algarve for the past 20 years.
The deed transferring the museum’s documentary and archival collection was signed by the Dutch businessman and Silves Mayor Luísa Conduto on the day the city commemorates its reconquest from the Moors, by King Sancho I on 3 September 1189.
During a ceremony held at the Town Hall, de Vlieger expressed his satisfaction at being able to entrust the municipality with documents he described as “important and of enormous historical significance” to the municipality and to the families connected to the former factory.
Speaking to journalists, mayor Luísa Conduto stressed that the archive “tells the story of society and of the people who worked there”, as well as the “commercial and social relationships that, over the course of around 100 years, shaped the history of Silves through the cork industry”.
The collection, comprising thousands of documents and photographs, represents “the return to the people and to Silves of part of its identity”. The archive had already been catalogued when it was previously transferred to the Faro District Archive, but it will now undergo further “scientific study and processing”.
The Fábrica do Inglês was founded on 2 January 1894 by cork company Avern, Sons & Barris, which exported wares from Silves to the wider London and Catalan industries.
In 1918, under the direction of Victor Sadler, the factory was modernised and became one of the largest cork-processing plants in Portugal. The industrial complex was converted into a museum in 1999, preserving the former cork-processing production line almost entirely intact. In 2001, the Cork Museum received the Luigi Micheletti Award for Europe’s Best Industrial Museum and attracted more than 100,000 visitors that same year.
The museum closed in 2009 following the insolvency of its owning company. It remained closed for 16 years before reopening this year.
Source: LUSA
Photo credit: Antrix
