Nautical Arts Center

Nautical Arts Center

Integrated in the municipal action plan “Vila do Conde, a port for the world”, the creation of the CAN - Nautical Arts Center project aims to reinforce memory and add value to the municipality of Vila do Conde. Therefore, the Municipality of Vila do Conde, intending to conciliate with an almost lost memory, such as the one of wooden shipbuilding, will install the CAN - Nautical Arts Center in the building of the former Seca do Bacalhau (Cod Drying), where, for several decades, the wooden shipbuilding and cod drying activity were closely related.

The main guidelines of the CAN - Nautical Arts Center project are:

• Requalification: it will enable the rehabilitation of the property′s cultural heritage, according to an architectural program focused on the readaptation and qualification of the space, providing it with new interpretative, museological, pedagogical and educational aspects, also integrating a workshop space.
• Development: personalized project implemented through various partners, namely local, regional, national and international partners, relying on the permanent involvement and active participation of the local community and its various agents (business, associative, cultural, artistic, educational, school, among others);
• Positioning: new economic resources center for the territory, with the promotion of new products and services for the city, the municipality and the region, namely through the association of services/skills of its service offer, in particular its Workshops, with the local tourism, cultural entrepreneurship, leisure and sports sectors;
• Municipal Pole: it gathers the collection, documentation and registration of the arts and workshop techniques associated with the traditional naval wooden shipbuilding and repairing in Vila do Conde, which classifies them as activities registered in the I.N.P.C. (National Institute for Cultural Heritage);
• Affirmation: space for contact and dialogue between technical, scientific and research communities associated with Shipbuilding, namely Naval and Underwater Archaeology, Anthropology, among others;
• Assumption: key equipment in the process of revalorization and sustainable urban regeneration of the riverside and maritime front of the city of Vila do Conde.