Tour Guide, Portimao, Portugal
| 2 mins read
The historical centers of the cities of Faro, Tavira and Lagos are enriched with houses that go back to the 17th and 18th centuries.
These constructions present a characteristic roof so called "scissor" and formed by four slopings that have nothing to do with the rest of the typical architecture of this region.
They look like covers coming from cold and rainy lands. The people call these roofs "tesouro", that is treasure, but without giving any etymological explaination.
On the classic definition of "tesoura", of scissor, some architects justify this name deriving it from the construction technique: a complex of long beams of support and short aces ingeniously scissor supporting the sloping and half opened like the instrument of the taylor.
Those historians who instead have centralized their attention on the origin have not been able to reach practical results.
The current guided by Orlando Ribeiro assures that these scissor roofs are typical of the Portuguese coast and in particular of Algarve; then another tradition declares that they were imported by emigrants from Veneto of the lagoon Republic; a third current, instead, supports that they are the result of Portuguese immigrants that returned from India and wanted to propose the typical pagoda covers of that far land.
Functionally they had two goals: to facilitate the recollection of the insufficient rainwater that fell in Algarve and to favour the cooling of the rooms standing below it during the summer.