The Stone house
Casa do Penedo
Interesting facts
- Vandals smashed the windows so often that they were replaced dozens of times, and the house was finally fitted with bulletproof glass and a steel door weighing about 400 kg.
- It was built as a weekend family retreat by a textile engineer from Guimarães, who chose to build between the boulders rather than clear them away.
- Beside the house is a swimming pool shaped around a natural boulder, and the fireplace inside is also set into the rock.
- Work took about two years and the house was finished in October 1974.
- The kitchen and living room occupy the ground floor, a wooden staircase leads up to the sleeping area, and each room's shape follows the curves of the rock.
- When photos of the house spread online, many doubted it was real until Portuguese television and the foreign press confirmed its existence.
Why it is worth it
High on a windswept ridge in the hills of northern Portugal, a small house sits wedged between four enormous granite boulders, so that the rock itself forms its foundations, much of its walls and part of its roof. Seen from the road, the Casa do Penedo, the House of the Boulder, looks less like something built than something that grew out of the hillside, and it has become one of the most photographed curiosities of the hill country between the Minho and Trás-os-Montes, often nicknamed the "Flintstones house".
The house was built in the first half of the 1970s, over about two years, as a country retreat for the family who owned it, and was used as a holiday home. Apart from the doors, windows and roof covering, the structure is made entirely of stone, and the huge rounded rocks dominate every side of it. The rustic theme continues inside, where stairs, banisters and furniture are made from rough tree trunks, among them a massive eucalyptus-wood sofa that weighs around 350 kg. The house has never been connected to the electricity grid, which gives a certain irony to its setting, since the ridge around it is lined with the turbines of a modern wind farm. Over the years its fame spread far beyond the region, and part of the house now serves as a small display of photographs and objects from its history.
The setting is the Serra de Fafe, an upland of granite outcrops, heath and scrub at the meeting point of the parishes of Moreira do Rei and Várzea Cova, with long views towards the Marão range and the hills above Braga and Guimarães. Fafe, the municipal town below, grew wealthy in the nineteenth century on money sent home by emigrants returning from Brazil, and its streets still show the grand houses of these "Brazilians"; Guimarães, the historic town often called the cradle of Portugal, lies about 20 km to the south-west.
Getting there
The Casa do Penedo stands in the Serra de Fafe, about 10 km north-east of the centre of Fafe on the way towards Cabeceiras de Basto, which is about 7 km away. The small regional airport of Vila Real (VRL) is about 38 km away in a straight line, while Porto Airport (OPO), the main international airport of northern Portugal, is about 58 km to the south-west.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Casa do Penedo is an architectural monument located between Celorico de Basto and Fafe, in northern Portugal. It received its name because it was built from four large boulders that serve as the foundation, walls and ceiling of the house.
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