Located in Seia, in Serra da Estrela, the Bread Museum is one of the biggest promoters of the inland region, so often forgotten. As an integrative project that democratizes and decentralizes access to culture, it continues to be one of the most visited museums in the country, even 22 years after its foundation, proving that it is possible to attract thousands of people to a geography far from the coast, and therefore less obvious. The Bread Museum creates jobs, promotes the integration of people into the job market in the area of culture and boosts the local economy, proving to be an exercise in economic and social sustainability.

It currently receives 77,000 visitors per year and the simplicity and transversality of the “Bread” theme means that the multisensory experience about the heritage of bread is enjoyed by people of all ages and profiles. Even though museums are important instruments for preserving the cultural memory of a people, two decades ago only a small part of the population visited them. For many people, the Bread Museum was the first museum they ever visited, and that memory is often recalled with nostalgia and pride.

This week it won the “Sustainable Project” award given by TNews, the leading digital newspaper providing specialized information for tourism, proving that the concept of sustainability increasingly goes beyond the boundaries of ecology and embraces concepts such as social and economic sustainability (which, moreover, also encourages a smaller ecological footprint). Basically, the return to the economy of proximity, of people, of the handmade. Paying a fair price for work that few want or know how to do, so that new people fall in love with it and want to continue.

The Bread Museum, which has obsessively pursued this principle of economic and social sustainability since 2002, opened in 2023 a new space dedicated to the queen of its region, the Serra da Estrela sheep and its three economies: milk, wool and lamb meat. The new Serra da Estrela Sheep Interpretive Center has a single purpose – to demonstrate the feasibility of an economic concept that places the human being at its epicenter and restores the conditions for the settlement of populations in low-density territories, which under a sustainable economic model are reborn from the ashes to demonstrate that being a sheepherder can after all be a more interesting profession than almost all those that exist in a big city.