Museu Willy Zumblick

Museum dedicated to Tubarão's most celebrated painter, with 72 canvases documenting regional life and history

Willy Zumblick was Tubarão's most important artist — a painter who spent his life recording the people, landscapes, and events of southern Santa Catarina in a style that combined European academic training with direct observation of regional life. The museum built in his honour in 2000 holds 72 canvases, eight sculptures, and an archive of medals, certificates, and tributes received over a career spanning more than five decades.

The paintings range from large historical compositions to intimate portraits of local characters and everyday scenes. Themes of Azorean immigration, the 1974 flood disaster, and the lives of Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi (who spent time in the Laguna region) recur throughout. For anyone interested in the social history of Santa Catarina, the collection is absorbing and unusually personal.

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A story
Willy Zumblick (1913–2008) painted through nearly a century of Tubarão life. Among his most significant works are paintings of the catastrophic 1974 flood — the worst natural disaster in Santa Catarina's history — that killed hundreds and destroyed much of the city. He painted what he had witnessed with the eye of a documentary filmmaker and the hand of a classically trained artist.