Fátima Presbytery

The new building has two floors (-1 and 0). Floor -1 is made up of technical rooms, rooms for preparing celebrations, sanitary facilities, the Sacred Reserve and the Sacristy. The ground floor is reserved for celebrations.   

In a construction with a very specific character, the highlight is the construction of two white concrete walls with a reduced number of stereotomy lines using marine plywood formwork panels with special dimensions, never before commercialised in Portugal (7.5 m x 2.7 m). Both walls, 8 metres long and 5.60 metres high, with varying thicknesses of 0.60 metres and 0.30 metres, had to be concreted in a single pour per wall. 

The Presbytery canopy is supported by two white concrete walls. It is 16 m cantilevered and is covered with fibreglass panels previously manufactured and transported to the site with maximum dimensions of 16 m long x 4 m wide. 

It is important to highlight the fundamental role of the stone cladding in this construction, as the entire staircase around the Presbytery is made up of solid steps made of cream ataíja stone, 15 cm thick, 0.40 m deep and of varying lengths. All the floors in the building have been covered in cream-coloured ataíja stone. 

The special installations included the design of three pieces of equipment developed specifically for this work - a mechanism that raises and lowers a stone-covered lifting wall that rises from floor -1 to floor 0, and two others to lower/raise the two video walls installed in the colonnades (outside the Presbytery). 

This project also included the installation of new sound and video equipment and a major intervention in the lighting, not only in the Basilica Tower and the existing colonnades, but also in the New Presbytery, through the inclusion of equipment capable of creating various scenarios depending on the type of celebration.