The San Payo Convent was founded in the late fourteenth century by religious people from Galicia, belonging to the Congregation of the Minor Friars of St. Francis. It was the fourth Franciscan convent built in Portugal.

In this difficult place for religious life, and despite all the difficulties, a community succeed to endure, becoming a space of holiness and contemplative life on the rocky shores of the Minho creeks. The roughness of the insulation, successive plundering and political impositions over the centuries made the convent fell gradually into ruins. It was finally abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century.

Until one day, when sculptor José Rodrigues (re) finds it…

From an initial study of the Viana de Lima architect, José Rodrigues restored the building.

Considering the careful restoration it has been subject of – preserving and patent a rare specimen of monastic architecture and observant Franciscans - the convent is a museum itself.

Inhabited by one of the great references of contemporary Portuguese art, it has become a kind of studio-museum. The collection of sculptures, drawings and paintings owned by the author integrates a collection of a few hundred pieces, that will allow the visitors to better understand the work of José Rodrigues.