Loulé council is to authorise work at the city’s main church, a national monument, which will have its altarpieces restored, the entrance area repaired and the structure restored in order to solve various technical and safety problems.
The area around the Igreja de S. Clemente, in the snappily named ‘Largo do Batalhão dos Sapadores dos Caminhos de Ferro,’ also will be improved.
The first phase will begin in November, with repairs to two altars, Altar da Nossa Senhora da Conceição and the Altar de S. Brás, both of which are suffering from years of wear and tear to materials which now are in very poor condition.
The estimated cost of the first stage is around €70,000 with the work needed on the entrance area still in the tendering phase, and the work on the exterior still in the design phase.
Since the Church is classified as a National Monument, the conservation and restoration work will have to be monitored closely.
Located in Largo do Batalhão dos Sapadores dos Caminhos de Ferro, the most southern area of the historical centre of Loulé, the Igreja Matriz of Loulé or Igreja de S. Clemente, derives its name from the conquest of the city from the Moors.
Probably built on the site of the mosque of Al'-Ulyà, the Igreja de S. Clemente dates back to the second half of the C13th when the Archbishop of Braga commissioned the Dominican friars to build several Christian churches in the Algarve.
Since its construction, the church has undergone a few changes, the last ones was after the 1969 earthquake when the church needed major work under the General Directorate of National Buildings and Monuments, including the rescue of some medieval parts that had been adulterated. The main church is in a Gothic style, with side chapels added in the C16th in the Manueline style.
Parish computerisation programme
The Bishop and management of the Diocese of the Algarve are fully behind a computerisation programme that will enable the region's parishes to enter and access records from smartphones and tablets. Baptisms, marriages and deaths can be entered and access given to for the management of the parish timetable and its accounts and treasury functions, the ability to issue receipts and to work on and submit parish budgets.
The www.aparoquia.com portal uses bar code and QR code technology to record and manage parish inventories and log the assets of 2,550 parishes in the dioceses of Angra do Heroísmo, Aveiro, Beja, Braga, Bragança-Miranda, Coimbra, Funchal , Lamego, Leiria-Fatima, Lisbon, Porto, São Tomé and Principe, Setúbal, Viana do Castelo, Vila Real and Viseu.
The Bishop of the Algarve has said that computerisation is to happen in all his parishes, "This can not be optional for parishes. It is not the parish priests or lay people in each parish who decide whether or not to computerise their parish. It must be done as the diocese and those who come later will regret it, if this generation do not catch this train,” D. Manuel Quintas said last year to his parish priests and those responsible for the computerisation of each of the Algarve’s parish.
The project was agreed in the year 2000 at the Episcopal Conference and Oporto was chosen for a pilot scheme to copy and record all the area's parish records. In 2010, the project team moved to develop a network of parishes from the north to the south of the mainland and on the Portugal's islands, so that access to information was available to parish communities in different locations at the same time.
The Church now has 'A Paróquia - Administração Paroquial,' its own online service where a parish priest and other registered users can manage their areas by using a computer, smartphone or, rather appropriately, a tablet.
