Palácio da Bolsa
Porto's 19th-century stock exchange palace, famous for its Moorish-revival Arabian Hall.
The Palácio da Bolsa was built for the Commercial Association of Porto on land beside the church of São Francisco, where the convent cloister had burned down during the siege of 1832. Work began in 1842 to a neoclassical design by Joaquim da Costa Lima Júnior, and the interiors were completed piecemeal over the following decades by a succession of Portuguese architects and craftsmen. The building still houses the association and forms part of the Historic Centre of Porto, inscribed by UNESCO in 1996.
Visitors are taken through a sequence of richly finished rooms, beginning in the Hall of Nations, a former trading floor roofed by an octagonal iron and glass dome and painted with the arms of Portugal's trading partners. The tour continues up the granite Noble Staircase to the General Assembly Room, the Gustave Eiffel cabinet, the portrait and court rooms, and ends in the Arabian Hall, an exuberant Moorish-revival chamber worked in gilded stucco between 1862 and 1880.
Highlights
- Arabian Hall in gilded Moorish-revival stucco, inspired by the Alhambra
- Hall of Nations under an octagonal iron and glass dome
- Granite Noble Staircase and the General Assembly Room
- Part of the UNESCO-listed Historic Centre of Porto
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