I have always heard people refer that Cartaxo was the land of many good craftsmen, who not only produced for the local market but also for a wider market. Proof of this was the creation of the Grémio Artístico Cartaxense, still in the 19th century, and its museum of miniatures already in the 20th century, with pieces that reflect the know-how of some of the many existing trades.

In recent years, in the historic center of Cartaxo, the renovation of the buildings has caused some balcony railings and fine works of artistic metalwork to disappear, diminishing the artistic and patrimonial value of the urban set and the testimony of that Golden Age of Cartaxo’s artificers. In the particularity of the town, this value is given, not exclusively, but mainly, by the existence and visual effect of the decorative arts applied to architecture: tiles, ceramics, decorative stonework, and the most beautiful examples of the art of Vulcan, god of fire, called art irons or artistic metalwork. Once, the many pieces of artistic carpentry (doors and windows), most of which have now been lost, were part of this ensemble.

Dated irons

Besides the beauty they give to the facades, often turning the streets into open-air museums, many of these building elements help historians to date the architecture and the commissioner, respectively, because they show the dates or marked formal characteristics, and have initials with the initials of the former owners’ names. In general, today in the city of Cartaxo, artistic locksmith subsists, datable, from the baroque of the late 18th century to the Art Dèco of the 1930s.

The oldest dated ironwork that is visible in Cartaxo must be that of a window grille, which serves as a staircase breather, dated 1840 (R. Mouzinho de Albuquerque, 43), followed by the cemetery gate (1878), and some gate flags (1876, Casa Cunha 13), the LavriCartaxo gate (1923, Rua Batalhós, 79), the gate of ABP-1924 (Augusto Batista Pego, Rua Dr. Manuel Gomes da Silva, 5) and that of Casal da Boavista, FBC-1926 (Rua da Boavista, 33). It is a pity that the beautiful examples from the farms of São Gil and Santa Eulália are not dated, but they may well be from the first half of the 19th century.

Cartaxo and its parishes have, therefore, a good few tons of iron, suspended on their facades, which required a lot of work and skill from the artificers, which, having been an investment in the beautification of the buildings, today constitute a cultural heritage that should be preserved, by means of municipal regulations for the protection of facades with certain characteristics.