Navio-Museu Santo André

Sturdy, black-hulled and proud, the Santo André is the last of her kind: a side trawler from the Portuguese cod-fishing fleet, built in 1948, which spent half a century in the fog and ice of the North Atlantic and now rests at anchor as a museum in Ílhavo.

A life on the northern seas

The Santo André was commissioned by the Aveiro Fishing Company and built in the Netherlands, 71 metres of river of her own — with a hold for some 1,200 tons of cod. For decades she sailed to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the waters off Greenland, where Portuguese fishermen fished from dories in conditions few can imagine. When the fleet was cut down in the 1990s, her owners and the town of Ílhavo chose memory over the scrapyard: in 2001 the old trawler reopened as the Navio-Museu Santo André, a floating monument to the ‘cod heroes’. She is a partner of the Ílhavo Maritime Museum and its famous cod aquarium, and stands across the lagoon from the beaches of Costa Nova and the city of Aveiro.

What to see

• The engine room, galley and crew quarters
• The fish hold and the tools of the cod trade
• The hospital and the wheelhouse
• The museum’s film archive of the campaigns
• The setting — the fishing harbours of Gafanha da Nazaré

Practical information

The ship lies at Jardim Oudinot, Gafanha da Nazaré, near Ílhavo, 10 minutes from Aveiro. Visits are on foot through the ship, with steep stairs and no lift — not suitable for reduced mobility. Closed Mondays; combined tickets with the Maritime Museum.

Image credit: Navio-Museu Santo André by Vítor Oliveira — CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.