Aveiro Port and «Santa Maria Manuela» lugger hand-in-hand

The Aveiro Port and the owner company of the renewed “Santa Maria Manuela” lugger signed a protocol aimed at future collaboration between the two entities.

Belonging to the Portuguese White Fleet, the renewed “Santa Maria Manuela” lugger is a live symbol of a mythic period of the codfish fishing, of inestimable historical and cultural value, was returned to the national and regional identity patrimony by the Pascoal & Filhos, S.A. company that, in the year of 2010, finished the project of recovering and exploration of the ship.

Advertising “Aveiro Port” brand in all the trips and activities developed by the distinguished ship, is one of the commitments assumed on the protocol by Pascoal & Filhos, S.A..

On the other hand, the APA, S.A. will take the compromise to exempt the “Santa Maria Manuela” from paying applicable to the ship Port tariffs, when the vessel stops or remains in Aveiro Port.

José Luís Cacho, APA’s president, and Aníbal Paião, Pascoal & Filhos’s administrator, expressed, on the signing act, the wish of an advantageous cooperation between the two corporations, promising to quickly study a set of initiatives to be developed on the “Santa Maria Manuela”.

The recovering project of the ship, that receive in 2008 the “Interest Declaration to Tourism”, rescued the cod fishing lugger from an announced end, returning it to its sea and to its people, transforming it in a destined place to cultural tourism of maritime vocation and to scientific investigation, where it can be find, among other things, connected with maritime cartography activities, sailing principles, nautical instruments functioning, history of cod fishing or maritime biology.

Aware of the touristic vocation, this way emphasized, of the lugger “Santa Maria Manuel”, the APA’s conviction is that the ship shapes a privileged vehicle to commercial promotion of the brand “Aveiro Port”, offering the possibility to divulge the port and its services to a vast national and international public;

Being APA, S.A. committed with the exercise of an active social responsibility on the region that belongs, sees on the “Santa Maria Manuela” the singular opportunity to support a project devoted to the promotion of scientific investigation and divulgation of matters intrinsically connected to the identity and cultural regional patrimony.