contemporary portuguese art at the western tip of the island
The building won the Alvar Aalto medal in 2012 and was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe in 2005. Paulo David, a Madeiran architect, created here a complex that integrates a house with 16th-century origins (there's a date carved on a lintel: 1759) with a purpose-built exhibition volume. The result is the reason many people go to the MUDAS even before thinking about the collection.
But the collection deserves attention of its own. It began in the 1960s as Funchal's visual arts prize, grew at the Fortaleza de São Tiago for years with less than 430 square metres of exhibition space, and reached Calheta in 2015 with more than 1,800. Joana Vasconcelos, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Helena Almeida, Jorge Molder, Álvaro Lapa: these are names you quickly define as references of contemporary Portuguese art, and they're all here.
There's also a historical detail that goes unnoticed: the land belonged to the entailed estate of Vale de Amores, a property with a direct genealogical link to João Gonçalves Zarco, the discoverer of Madeira. His granddaughter lived here. That detail gives the place another depth.
The MUDAS is in Estreito da Calheta, on one of the quieter sides of the island, a short distance from the basalt coast and the black sand beach. It's a programme that easily fills an afternoon and isn't exhausted on the first visit.
what you'll find
- award-winning architecture that is, in itself, a reason to visit
- a collection of Portuguese art with works from the 1960s to the present
- the original 16th-century house integrated into the complex
- an auditorium, a library and an educational service in the same space
- silence and natural light that many urban museums can't manage
