Final stage includes restoration protocols and a scheduled maintenance plan
23/6/2025
Activities in the field were resumed by the team of exploratory project ‘São João de Calvos’ in the beginning of June, in order to detect a possible inclination of the walls of the 13th-century Romanesque-style rural church, and to plan a strategy for the recovery of the roof and the façade architrave.
In this third trip to Guimarães, in the North of Portugal, PI Fabio Sitzia (HERCULES – University of Évora / IN2PAST), co-PI Jorge Ribeiro (Lab2PT – University of Minho / IN2PAST) and team member Paulo Bernardes (also from Lab2PT) were joined by Daniel Oliveira, Associate Professor at UMinho’s Department of Civil Engineering, appointed by the Guimarães City Council to write a plan to restore the church.
This one-year exploratory project funded by IN2PAST, a pilot case study focused on the Heritage – Building Information Modelling (H-BIM) digitalisation of the S. João de Calvos chapel, entered its final phase, which includes writing protocols for the church’s restoration and a plan for scheduled maintenance.
On June 2nd and 3rd, besides Daniel’s work on the recovery of the church’s roof and the façade architrave, Jorge Ribeiro and Paulo Bernardes carried out the digital survey to assess if any walls are leaning, which included using ‘hoses’ with communicating vessels to detect a reference plane passing through the monument.