Ordered to be built by José Gonçalves de Lima Camacho (1831-1892), in the 2nd half of the 19th century, this house, despite maintaining many of its original features, has undergone transformations that significantly altered its original image.

José Camacho, a “make-trip” enriched in Brazil, thought, as was usual at the time, that investment in real estate was the most obvious and safest way to value and reproduce the accumulated capital. This house was not “commissioned” to be your home. It was intended to “yield”, either through the lease, or through an eventual and profitable sale. José Camacho was the maternal great-grandfather of Álvaro Siza and he certainly never imagined the adventures that his enterprise would go through. Let us check the main ones.

From the outset, the fact that the house remained in the family despite having been rented to strangers for many years. Then, finding herself unoccupied when Álvaro's father decided to leave his mother's house, in Brito Capelo, and was able to rent it even before he could buy it. Then, in 1960, the decision to remodel it, according to the needs of the family and according to the project of the son who was beginning to consolidate a career as an exceptional architect.

However, in 1954 the house had become the public reference of the tragedy that brutally rocked not only the family, but also the entire local community: the death, in a stupid accident, of Júlio Manuel, the eldest son, recently graduated in Medicine.

Although the father never explained it, it is likely that one of the reasons underlying the decision to do works at home was the desire to exorcise some of the ghosts that persisted in the most personal spaces of the missing son.

In recent years and after a long period in which it has been uninhabited, the need for rehabilitation has increased.

Acquired by the Municipality of Matosinhos to install the Álvaro Siza Documentation Center, restoration works were carried out which, despite the evident change in functions, essentially remade the house as proposed in the 1960 project.