Um pouco da história de Aveiro...

(information taken from the official website of the municipality of Aveiro) | see more Câmara Municipal Aveiro (here)

While the human presence in Aveiro dates back at least to recent prehistory, evident in the tumuli and dolmens that exist not only in the municipality but throughout the region, its great development came in a historical period.

Aveiro has always been linked to economic activities, and salt production and the shipbuilding trade were its main assets.

Valuable as an exchange commodity, salt was probably already exploited in Roman times and is documented from 959 onwards in the will of Countess Mumadona Dias to the Cenóbio [monastery] of Guimarães.

It was in this same will that the oldest known form of the toponym Aveiro appears, in which Mumadona Dias donates the entire region to the monastery of Guimarães “Suis terras in Alauario et Salinas”.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the construction of a wall around the town reflects the prestige and growth that Aveiro had achieved. Later, the religious and welfare institutions would be installed, which would give the city its sparkle for centuries, helping it to overcome the less good times experienced in the 17th and 18th centuries with the progressive silting up of the bar. It was the artificial opening of the bar in 1808 that gradually restored Aveiro's dynamism, marking the beginning of a new era.

The preponderance of 19th and 20th century buildings reflects this phase, and also reveals the desire to keep up with the taste of the time, evident in the Art Nouveau decoration of some buildings, repeated elsewhere in the region, or in the clean lines of Art Deco and Modernism driven by the Estado Novo. Today, the challenge lies in the university campus, the stage for the great national architects.

Side by side with progress, tradition persists in some ethnographic experiences, as well as in the architecture of the region's rural areas, where various aspects of traditional Portuguese construction come together in the gandaresa house. Aveiro also preserves tiled single-storey houses in Alboi and, in particular, in the Beira Mar neighborhood, living testimonies of the old marnotos [salt workers] and faithful fishermen devoted to S. Gonçalinho and S. Roque.

In front of you... the Ria with all the beauty of its landscape mixed with islets and cays teeming with biodiversity.

Then there's the dunes of S. Jacinto with its reserve, a nature sanctuary, and the small town marked by the fishing of the lagoon, the art of xávega and the distant fishing of cod in the cold seas of Newfoundland.

The preponderance of the ceramics industry in the region is not just a reflection of technological advances, but the result of a long tradition of production favored by the geological constitution of the region and dating back at least to the late Roman/medieval period, as evidenced by the ceramic kilns of Eixo.

Today, a region experiencing rapid economic growth is able to combine the testimonies of the past with current demands, involving the University of Aveiro, on a path to sustainable development that will guarantee the future.