where whale oil became memory
It started with an industrialist from Lisbon who saw an opportunity in the Flores. Francisco Marcelino dos Reis had the factory built in 1941 and two years later it was producing whale oil. The Museu da Fábrica da Baleia do Boqueirão today occupies that same building, recovered decades after it had sat idle and classified as a Property of Public Interest.
The distance between what this place was and what it is today isn't measured only in years. You measure it in the tools, the tanks, the industrial structures that stayed in place and that the museum didn't try to hide. The opening was in July 2015, but the raw material of the place is from the first half of the 20th century.
The Flores are the westernmost island of the archipelago, and whaling was for decades one of the few economies that put money on the island. Visiting this museum in Santa Cruz das Flores is to grasp that there was a whole chain of hard work between the sighting at sea and the oil that reached the market.
what you'll find
- the original industrial building, not a reconstruction
- direct context on the Azorean whaling industry
- an island with few visitors and plenty of room to think
