Two real estate developers buy Fábrica do Inglês to reopen the Cork Museum and create a boutique hotel
Real estate developers Antrix and Carvoeiro Branco have purchased the Fábrica do Inglês in Silves, where they plan to build a “charming” hotel and reopen the iconic Cork Museum.
The announcement was made this Wednesday, September 3, in a press release sent by both companies.
According to them, “the future of Fábrica do Inglês will involve the valorization of its cultural aspect and the industrial memory that gave rise to it, with emphasis on the reopening of a space open to the community, which will once again place the Factory at the heart of the city’s cultural life.”
The starting point, they guarantee, “will be the reopening of the Cork Museum, distinguished in 2001 as the best industrial museum in Europe, a year in which it received more than 100 thousand visitors”, but which closed in 2009.
The project also includes the preservation and rehabilitation of the historic buildings that make up the complex, with a special focus on the iconic 19th-century chalet, “which will be carefully restored and will continue to house a tea house.”
The future offices of Antrix and Carvoeiro Branco are also planned to be located inside one of the renovated historic buildings.
The creation of a charming hotel unit will complete the project.
For Erik de Vlieger, CEO of Carvoeiro Branco, “Fábrica do Inglês is an essential landmark in Silves’ collective memory. Our goal is to preserve its identity and bring it back to life with a new purpose that values the region and respects its history.”
“We are proud to be in a position to reactivate such an important space for the city and the Algarve,” he adds.
The industrial unit known as Fábrica do Inglês was built by a partnership that included the company Avern, Sons & Barris and a cork businessman from Silves, Gregório Nunes Mascarenhas, in 1893.
Gregório Mascarenhas had been president of the Municipality of Silves and several cultural initiatives and public buildings in the city had his personal sponsorship.
From 1938, when a third of the factory was sold to the London company Henry Bucknall & Sons, the property had several owners, Portuguese and English.
From 1962 until 1995, when the unit stopped working, it belonged to José Alexandre Estrelo and his sister Ana Cristina Estrelo, sons of a cork company employee.
In 1998, the Sociedade Fábrica do Inglês, owned by the Alicoop/Alisuper Group, acquired the property and its contents, and installed a theme park, restaurants and museum there.
The factory complex occupies a block and the old single-story factory buildings are built around a central courtyard, where there is a garden and a small chalet with a cross plan.
The exterior facades are blind for almost their entire length, and are opened to the west by three iron gates.
The renovation work on the complex, which took place between 1998 and 1999, allowed the installation of the Cork Museum, directed by Manuel Castelo Ramos (now deceased), which in 2001 was awarded the Micheletti Prize for the Best Industrial Museum in Europe by the European Museum Forum.
The Cork Museum has been closed since 2009, around the same time that the Fábrica do Inglês complex, which belonged to the Alicoop/Alisuper Group, which was now bankrupt, closed.
The English Factory was purchased in May 2014, at public auction, by Caixa Geral de Depósitos, largest creditor of the company Fábrica do Inglês Gestão de Empresas Imobiliárias e Turísticas, within the scope of whose insolvency the auction took place.
The Museum’s assets were purchased by the Nogueira Group, which had in the meantime purchased part of the former Alicoop supermarkets, disregarding the Silves City Council’s expressed wish to acquire them. They were, however, classified as movable assets of municipal interest. decision published in 2024 in the Official Gazette.
