The Modernist Weekend, an event celebrating Faro’s modernist architecture, is leaving the capital of the Algarve for the first time. Its fifth edition, set to take place from 6 to 8 November, will stretch to Olhão and Tavira, the organisers have announced.
“Our community of modernism enthusiasts has grown since we launched the event. We’ve been invited to take part in all sorts of opportunities, and for the first time we’re going beyond the borders of Faro, to Olhão and Tavira,” Christophe de Oliveira, who has organised the event since 2022, told journalists.
The move, he said, confirms “the importance of modernist architectural heritage” across the whole Algarve. That heritage found its voice from the second half of the last century, with a language all its own.
“It didn’t just happen here in Faro, but across the region. That international modernist movement, launched by Le Corbusier [1887-1965] and other architects of his generation, was adapted to the countries and regions where it took root, becoming regionalism: modernism with a local accent,” explained the businessman, who runs a guesthouse in Faro.
The architect Manuel Gomes da Costa (1921-2016) was the central figure of the movement in the Algarve. He designed more than 400 buildings in the region, most of them in the eastern Algarve (the so-called sotavento).
“In Faro, it’s hard to be on a street without coming across a Manuel Gomes da Costa building, and in Vila Real de Santo António it’s harder still,” said De Oliveira, who started the Modernist Weekend to bring that legacy to a wider audience.
This year’s programme includes a Saturday visit to the Santa Catarina da Fonte do Bispo olive oil producers’ agricultural cooperative, in the Tavira municipality. Its silos, now disused, have been home since last year to Museu Zer0, Portugal’s first digital art museum.
“It was a work by Manuel Gomes da Costa, corresponding to his final-year thesis. An agricultural building that has now been converted into a digital art museum,” the organisers said of the visit, which will be led by the researcher Victor Hugo Faustino and a museum representative.
In Olhão, a Sunday walk through the town will explore the influence of modernist architecture, notably its cubist strain, and of industrialisation on the transformation of the former fishing village.
“Olhão is a unique city in Portugal, perhaps even in Europe, for its architecture and its history,” said De Oliveira, who will lead the walk alongside the English artist Richard Walker, who published a book on modernism in the Algarve this year.
Faro, which “will continue to play a central role” in the event, will host several activities. They include a walk on modernism in the city, another on the architecture of Faro beach, and a third centred on Gomes da Costa’s work in the urban area around the João de Deus Secondary School.
Last year the Modernist Weekend drew “around 500 people, half of them foreign”, and it does not expect to exceed that in 2026. The emphasis, De Oliveira said, is “more on the diversity and quality of sites not yet made public” than on the number of walks and visits.
The full programme for the fifth edition is available online, where tickets of up to €20 can be booked for the routes. Some are already sold out.
Source: LUSA
Photo credit: The Modernist Weekend
