The Hotel das Virtudes that “despite these noble origins, visible in many vestiges preserved by the hotel (ground-floor arcade, flirtatious benches in some of the windows, 16th-century doors…), the building underwent subsequent and significant extensions and refurbishments which, in the 17th century and especially in the 19th century, caused it to lose many of its aristocratic roots”.
Set in the surrounding cliffs, it occupies an old aristocratic residential building dating back to the 16th century – a time of great commercial dynamism in Miragaia as a result of the Portuguese maritime expansion. Its initial nobility, underlined on the façade by the placement in the 17th century of a coat of arms of the “Rocha, Ferreira e Barbuda” family, explains the exceptional nature of some of the monumentality and the rare and ample dimensions of the property, which are closer in their proportions to those of warehouses and factory spaces than to the rest of the living spaces of the vast majority of Porto residents.
