Located in Seia, in Serra da Estrela, the Bread Museum is one of the biggest promoters of the interior region, so often forgotten. As an integrative project that democratises and decentralises access to culture, it continues to be one of the most visited museums in the country, even more than two decades after its opening, proving that it is possible to attract thousands of people to a less accessible location far from the coast. The Bread Museum creates jobs, promotes the integration of people into the job market in the culture sector 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 bread heritage is enjoyed by people of all ages and backgrounds. 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.

In 2024, the Bread Museum won the “Sustainable Project” award given by TNews, the digital newspaper of reference for specialised 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, by the way, also foster a smaller ecological footprint). Basically, the return to the economy of proximity, of people, of the handmade. Paying a fair amount for the work that few already want or know how to do, so that new people fall in love with it and want to continue doing it.

The Bread Museum, which has been obsessively pursuing this principle of economic and social sustainability since 2002, opened a new space in 2023 dedicated to the queen of its region, the Serra da Estrela sheep and its three economies: milk, wool and lamb. The new Serra da Estrela Sheep Interpretive Centre 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.