picote has been keeping this for a long time
In Picote, a village in the municipality of Miranda do Douro, there are Roman funerary stelae discovered in the 1950s that spent decades stored in Bragança.
The Ecomuseu Terra Mater took care of bringing them back. It makes sense that they stay here. The ecomuseum reopened in 2023, set inside a restored traditional house. The permanent exhibition is organised around four elements, water, earth, fire and air, and uses them as the thread to tell the story of human occupation in this territory.
It isn't a museum of glass cases and captions in three languages. It's more intimate than that. The Mirandese language is present, and not as a curiosity in a display case. Associação Frauga, which drove the project, works actively to keep the culture of this region from disappearing with the older generations. You'll feel that urgency while you're there.
Take a walk through the village before or after you go in. Picote has the specific calm of places that survived without needing to please anyone.
what you won't find anywhere else
- the Roman stelae recovered from the Museu Abade de Baçal, back where they were found
- Mirandese language references scattered through the exhibition, no ceremony about it
- a project with local people behind it, not an initiative parachuted in
- the village of Picote around it, which rounds everything off
