Casa das Histórias Paula Rego

Striking red-pyramid museum dedicated to the Portuguese artist Paula Rego

A short walk south of central Cascais, the Casa das Histórias is a museum dedicated entirely to the work of the Portuguese painter, printmaker and illustrator Paula Rego. The building, completed in 2009, was designed by the Pritzker-prize-winning architect Eduardo Souto de Moura — two ochre-red pyramidal towers rising from a low concrete plinth, inspired by old Portuguese chimneys and surrounded by pines.

Inside, the collection rotates between paintings, prints, and drawings drawn from Rego's seventy-year career. Her work — dark, narrative, fierce, often drawing on Portuguese folklore and political memory — is best seen in person, where the scale and the unsettling figuration land harder than in reproductions. The museum is small enough to see thoroughly in an hour or so.

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A story
Paula Rego (1935–2022) is one of the most important Portuguese artists of the twentieth century, and the museum was built during her lifetime — unusual for a Portuguese painter. She insisted that the building be 'red, like a great old kiln', and Souto de Moura designed the two angular pyramidal towers to match the shape of the chimneys of old country houses in the area.

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