Portugal Heritage Tours - Portugal Heritage Tours

What we do

Genuine and authentic experiences.

What we do

Portugal Heritage Tours is a tour operator specialized in Cultural and Landscape Touring programs centered on Portugal’s unknown and often inaccessible heritage.

Outside the major tourist hubs, Portugal Heritage Tours offers the possibility to access, enter, discover, meet, perceive, contact, experience artistic dimensions, landscapes, gastronomic practices, ethnological traditions, forms of culture from all over the immense interior of Portugal.

Team

Founder of Portugal Heritage Tours

Catarina Valença Gonçalves

From bourgeoise Lisbon and French School Charles Lepierre to the third smallest municipality of the country, 2500 souls, Alvito, Alentejo. Always having lived between books and Art and attracted by Beauty, I studied Art History and, since the first year, wall paintings emerged: paintings that lived ineradicably in the place where they were created, crossing years, centuries, communities, testifying transformations and also different ways of being, but always belonging to that place: I’ve guided my journey in Art History with this testimony of Belonging in the horizon. Finally, I have found Alentejo, territory where I don’t have any kind of origins. Alentejo has the most considerable acquis of wall paintings of Portugal, it’srich in heritage resources- all of them being very singular – and, mainly, it has a way of being, in my understanding, synonymous of something that also attracts me greatly: Kindness. Beauty, Belonging and Kindness are therefore three transversal dimensions to all the work that I’ve developed, over 20 years, in cultural heritage: Portugal Heritage Tours is one of the forms that I’ve designed so that everybody can feel, experience, understand this culture that is so unique in all Alentejo. Besides the concept of the programs of Portugal Heritage Tours, I accompany some groups throughout the year.

Heritage Interpreter

Patrícia Monteiro

A divulgação do património histórico e artístico do Alentejo é um requisito fundamental para a definição de estratégias sustentadas que viabilizem a sua salvaguarda. Esta é uma premissa em que acredito absolutamente e que me fez dedicar os últimos vinte anos, ao estudo da pintura mural e das “artes da cal”, existentes nesta região do nosso país. A minha ligação, desde 1994, à Universidade de Lisboa permitiu, ao mesmo tempo, construir uma formação académica e profissional centradas na História da Arte nacional. O contacto directo com o Alentejo, com a sua cultura, as suas tradições, as suas gentes, o seu saber e a sua arte, fazem parte de um já longo percurso pessoal. É, para mim, um privilégio poder prosseguir nesse caminho, de aprendizagem e constante descoberta.