SAINT-ANTOINE CHURCH AND MUNICIPAL MUSEUM
Church with single nave, featuring a municipal museum with ethnography of the colonial Algarve and a collection of various inventions.
In Lagos, once you've reached this highly visible building, you'll find yourself face to face with one of the Algarve's outstanding works of art, whatever your sensibility towards religious buildings. This church is one of the region's major religious heritage sites. It stands out for having been designed with a single nave. A marvellous miniature in the art of the 18th-century Baroque talha dourada, it well deserves this national heritage listing. Its walls are covered in gilded wood, with scrolls and figures (some, on the right-hand wall, of indeterminate sex...) supporting columns framing paintings narrating the life of Saint Anthony. This masterpiece is attributed to Custódio de Mesquita and Gaspar Martins. The altarpiece is quite stunning. Unfortunately, the 1755 earthquake did not spare it. Its structure and moldings, as seen today, essentially date back to the 1769 reconstruction.
The church is a gateway to the Municipal Museum. The latter presents an ethnography of the colonial Algarve. It's a multi-disciplinary space that covers the history of the peoples who came to Portugal: from Neolithic menhirs to weapons, from a collection of coins to sacred art, and an exhibition of wacky 19th-century inventions. Several museums in one, just like the museums of the 1930s, when it was created. What a visit!
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