Raul Lino’s House of Comenda: from a medieval tower to a summer villa

Abstract

The House of Comenda, located in the astonishing landscape of Arrábida, overlooking the Sado river, is one of the most sublime, but lesser-known projects of the architect Raul Lino. Here, in a unique way, his creative genius and his deep understanding about nature result in an almost perfect symbiosis between landscape and construction. Beautifully depicted by Artur Pastor, this house contains a history that began centuries earlier, which assigns it, while human establishment, a wider significance. If, at the beginning of the 20th century, this is the vacation house of an aristocratic family, fifteen centuries earlier, during the Roman Empire, it constituted a fish processing industrial complex. Meanwhile, this place witnessed remarkable episodes in Portugal’s history, as, for example, an enigmatic “meeting” urgently convened by King Manuel I, described by a little known document we found in the Municipal Archives of Lisbon.