The Palaces of Wine

Walk through the streets of central Borba and you'll notice something strange: ordinary houses, two storeys, modest ground floors — and then, suddenly, in the middle of them, a façade that seems out of place. An elaborately carved doorway, windows framed in fine stonework, a scale that doesn't match the houses next door. These are the palaces of wine, and each one is a frozen portrait of a moment when someone, in this town, grew rich.

It happened twice, nearly a century apart. The first time, in the mid-eighteenth century, when Borba was living through its own Age of Enlightenment: the layout of the town changed, streets were widened, and there rose, on the old Rua da Aramenha, what is still considered one of the most important buildings in the town — the Palácio dos Melos. It belonged to one of the wealthiest families in the region, enriched, like almost everything in Borba, by the sale of wine.

The second time was different, and more telling. In the second half of the nineteenth century, wine production, which for centuries had been made the same way, in clay vessels inherited from the Romans, made the leap that the Industrial Revolution brought to all of Europe: wine presses arrived, mechanical crushers, modern cellar equipment. And that modernisation had an immediate social effect: production stopped being spread across hundreds of small family cellars and concentrated into a few hands — those who had the capital to invest in the new machinery. It was then that the Palácio Alvarez rose, every bit as imposing as the Palácio dos Melos, but born of a different kind of wealth: no longer the shared wealth of an entire town making wine at home, but the concentrated wealth of those who knew how to industrialise first.

Notice how these two palaces tell, without meaning to, the story of a quiet injustice. The ordinary architecture of the Borba winegrower's house, still visible on so many streets in the town today, always had the same layout: the ground floor for the cellar and the tavern, the floor above for living. It was a house that worked and lived in at the same time, modest in every way. The palaces are the exception to that rule: the house of someone who no longer needed to live above their own cellar, because they had others working it for them.

And this second generation of wealth had a short life. Just a few decades after the Palácio Alvarez was built, phylloxera arrived, and the vines of Borba, the very ones that had built those walls, died almost entirely. The great wine families who had built palaces suddenly found themselves without the foundation that had sustained everything. It is the same story this town has lived through in other forms: wealth that rises quickly on a single crop, and the fragility of depending on it alone.

Today, neither palace belongs to any family. The Palácio dos Melos, after serving as a school, was returned to the community by the town council: it is now the Municipal Library, with an Internet corner, a Children's Workshop and a Toy Library — a building raised for a single family, now full of children from every family. It isn't the first time this land has made that exchange. The dukes' houses in Vila Viçosa became museums; the convents became inns and cultural centres; and here, in Borba, the palaces of wine became houses of books and play.

The wealth that once set one family apart from the rest is now the place where the whole town comes together.