Portuguese Centre of Photography
Former eighteenth-century prison and law court turned photography museum, its cells now hung with images.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Portuguese Centre of Photography in Porto starts with the building's earlier life as the Cadeia da Relacao, a prison and law court built in the late 1700s that sorted inmates by rank, from ground-floor dungeons to cells for prisoners of status. It centers on the writer Camilo Castelo Branco, jailed here in the 1860s alongside Ana Placido after their affair scandalized the city, and on what he wrote during his sentence, drawing on his own family's history of forbidden love. You'll also hear how the prison held people for nearly two centuries before Portugal's 1970s revolution finally closed it. The galleries now fill the old cell floors, sorted the same way the prisoners once were.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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