Neighborhood of Economic Houses / Nossa Senhora da Assunção. - architect Eugénio Correia - 1935/38

In 1935, architect Eugénio Correia designed a neighborhood of affordable houses for the town of Olhão, in the General Directorate of Buildings and National Monuments in Lisbon, which would be the first to emerge from a state initiative, in the Algarve region. The construction of the new neighborhood was part of Decree-Law no. 23,052, of September 23, 1933, referring to economic houses, and was subsidized by the Ministry of Public Works and the Portuguese Consórcio de Conservas de Peixe, intended for industry workers. of preserves from Olhão.

The neighborhood located to the northwest of the town was opened in 1938, containing sixty-six single-story houses, differentiated into two types, with two or three bedrooms. Its distance from the urban center of the town is mainly due to the ideology of the Estado Novo, which defended the right to family property, refusing the ideas of collective housing for workers, justifying, therefore, the need for larger plots of land for implement this neighborhood, which functioned as an autonomous complex in the urban context, without connection to the existing urban fabric of the town of Olhão at the time of its construction.

The houses, praised for their modernism, were considered the best housing complex in the town, by architect João António Aguiar (author of the Olhão plan). They were, however, in line with the region's lifestyle due to the roof terrace, used for drying various foods, and their rear yard, which allowed them to be used as a vegetable garden.

The corporatist propaganda of the Estado Novo and the canning industry used the neighborhoods of Olhão and Portimão to promote their social initiatives in the publication “O Livro de Ouro das Conservas Portuguesas de Peixe”, by IPCP, where the habit of offering a housing for workers who stood out for their work and who were the oldest in age and profession (IPCP, 1938).

The authorization for the construction of the neighborhood comes as a result of contempt, attempted theft and assaults on factories and industrialists, reported in 1933, the year in which, as already mentioned, there was a spike in lack of work for the working population. However, this initiative was, frankly, insufficient to solve the housing problem in Olhão, which did not only affect the population of the canning industry, which would lead to other public housing initiatives in Olhão.