a house with history stacked up six centuries deep
There's a garden in the centre of Funchal where windows are buried. It isn't a metaphor: two Manueline openings from the 16th century, which belonged to the old Hospital da Misericórdia, ended up set into a garden wall when the original building was demolished. The Museu da Quinta das Cruzes works like that, as a conscious deposit for what the city kept throwing away.
The land has a long history. In the 15th century, this is where João Gonçalves Zarco, the first captain-donatary of Funchal, lived his final years. The dwelling you see today took its current shape in works of the 18th and 19th centuries, but the garden keeps fragments of far older constructions, gathered from demolitions across Funchal over the last two centuries.
The museum was born from two private collections: that of César Gomes, a goldsmith who donated everything in 1946, and that of Hans Wetzler, an Austrian refugee from the Second World War who reached Madeira in 1939 and became an antique dealer here, bequeathing his goldwork in 1966. They're the ones who give the house its character of a lived-in home, not an exhibition hall.
what stays in the memory
In the gardens there's an orchestrophone from 1900, a large mechanical instrument that still plays. There are also fountains in fajoco stone with an 18th-century fresco, and tombstones leaning against walls, including what tradition says is the grave of Henrique Alemão, one of the island's first settlers. Inside, the collection runs from Portuguese and English furniture to oriental ceramics, with paintings and jewellery covering the 15th century to the first half of the 20th. A house that's a replica of nothing.
come prepared for
- the garden asks for time, it isn't just a passage to the interior
- the Manueline windows set into the garden wall, easy to miss
- the orchestrophone: ask when it plays
- a house scale that makes everything closer than in a conventional museum
