Articles Recognitions

The Palace and the Medina

The intervention aims to create a hotel unit with 36 rooms, which are distributed between the pre-existing building, an eighteenth-century palace, and a new building that is divided into several volumes in the extensive curtilage area of the palace.

Palácio dos Tavares, both due to its grandeur and prominence in the surrounding urban fabric, and its intrinsic value as an architectural object, occupies a prominent place in the heritage and urban context of the city of Tavira. The nobility, proportion, and scale of its facades, with a sober yet assertive ornamentation, give it a unique presence that is important to preserve, by recovering its relationship with the city.

The ground floor of the Palace immediately assumes fundamental importance in accommodating the program. It is the connection between the hotel, the square, and the city, establishing a reciprocal relationship that provides them with a dynamic and added value in urban, cultural, touristic, and functional terms.

This idea of recovering a former way of life permeates the entire intervention. The facades will be rehabilitated to restore the integrity of the architectural elements, with special emphasis on the pilasters, friezes, balconies, and stone entablatures.

The program thus develops along these two axes: the rehabilitation and adaptation of the pre-existing structure, and the new construction, which, with its fragmented arrangement, resembles a medina.

The intention is for this new section of the hotel to not be a massive and uniform construction, but rather to adopt a more organic, winding scale that harmonizes with the surrounding urban fabric of the historic centre of Tavira.

Terraces and courtyards emerge as key elements in the design of the medina, reminiscent of the Arab influence in southern Portugal, as well as the daily life of the population in the eastern Algarve region and its relationship with the sea – a place for observation and vigilance, storage or preparation and drying of food, or simply a sitting area to enjoy summer afternoons.

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Aereal View
Axonometric visualization
Medina, ambience
Terrace, ambience
Back façade
Bedroom, ambience
Toilet, ambience

The intervention aims to create a hotel unit with 36 rooms, which are distributed between the pre-existing building, an eighteenth-century palace, and a new building that is divided into several volumes in the extensive curtilage area of the palace.

Palácio dos Tavares, both due to its grandeur and prominence in the surrounding urban fabric, and its intrinsic value as an architectural object, occupies a prominent place in the heritage and urban context of the city of Tavira. The nobility, proportion, and scale of its facades, with a sober yet assertive ornamentation, give it a unique presence that is important to preserve, by recovering its relationship with the city.

The ground floor of the Palace immediately assumes fundamental importance in accommodating the program. It is the connection between the hotel, the square, and the city, establishing a reciprocal relationship that provides them with a dynamic and added value in urban, cultural, touristic, and functional terms.

This idea of recovering a former way of life permeates the entire intervention. The facades will be rehabilitated to restore the integrity of the architectural elements, with special emphasis on the pilasters, friezes, balconies, and stone entablatures.

The program thus develops along these two axes: the rehabilitation and adaptation of the pre-existing structure, and the new construction, which, with its fragmented arrangement, resembles a medina.

The intention is for this new section of the hotel to not be a massive and uniform construction, but rather to adopt a more organic, winding scale that harmonizes with the surrounding urban fabric of the historic centre of Tavira.

Terraces and courtyards emerge as key elements in the design of the medina, reminiscent of the Arab influence in southern Portugal, as well as the daily life of the population in the eastern Algarve region and its relationship with the sea – a place for observation and vigilance, storage or preparation and drying of food, or simply a sitting area to enjoy summer afternoons.

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