Museums and Palaces

Housed in a former paper mill founded in 1822, the Terras de Santa Maria Paper Museum is a monographic museum illustrating the history of paper manufacturing in Portugal.

It includes fully operational industrial areas, thus providing visitors with the opportunity to participate in the manufacturing processes, corresponding to the proto-industrial and industrial periods in the History of Paper Manufacturing: the production of paper sheet by sheet and the making of continuous rolls of paper.

Also forming part of the Paper Museum are the ruins of the New Mill (1795-1958), which because of their imposing nature and the beauty of their surroundings, represent a unique space and provide a clear example of the importance enjoyed by some of the factories in the municipality of Santa Maria da Feira throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The museum has as its mission to preserve the memory of papermaking, so that the main aim of this new space is to enhance the historical, cultural and socio-economic values of a region that has been involved in the papermaking business for almost three centuries, permanently engaged in building a bridge between past and future.