It is impossible to remain indifferent to a historic house. Its architecture marks the landscape of villages, towns, and cities. With greater or lesser grandeur, each house holds a unique story, shared from generation to generation, often kept in secular documents that are now beginning to reveal their secrets. The owners have the difficult task of preserving their history and trying to keep it alive.

Over the last few years, the VINCULUM project has covered a vast set of archives of historic houses, recovering their memory, in an unprecedented investigation into Portuguese territory. Rigorous academic research combined with an urgent need to transfer knowledge and create value materialized in the development of the Spin-Off project of the Instituto de Estudos Medievais (IEM).

Due to the potentiality of this theme, the question arises: how can the university intervene in the construction of historically informed cultural tourism?

To answer this question, we invited the president of the Portuguese Association of Old Houses, António Mello, Joel Moedas Miguel, founder of the company Patrimonium, and Miguel Ayres de Campos, art historian and owner of Casa de Sá in Ponte de Lima.

The Spin-off of the IEM, in partnership with the VINCULUM project, held this session which aimed to demonstrate the potential of building a dialogue between the university and the entities responsible for the management of heritage and Historic Houses, in particular, to discuss solutions capable of fostering the connection between History and civil society.

We thank all those who attended the session, and especially the speakers, for offering us their vision and experience about such a rich and diverse heritage.

Photographs: Instituto de Estudos Medievais