District: Porto's historic building houses 55 companies

09 Feb 2017

The District Offices and Lifestyle was officially inaugurated today by the Mayor of Porto Rui Moreira and the promoter Endutex, a Northern industrial company that started to invest in projects in the cities. In this particular case, it has rehabilitated an old and abandoned historic building, between Praça da Batalha and Guindais, and already housing 55 companies, many of them from the technological and communication sectors, among others. A true business ecosystem, as Rui Moreira called it, built with private investment, young companies, local work force and a lot of imagination.

The rehabilitation of the former Porto Civil Government’s building, which also housed the Police, has cost two million euros, which turned the six thousand square meters into 66 business spaces. It now provides hundreds of jobs, mostly for young and from creative industries, without public investment, but with a municipal contribution: the facilitation in the licensing and the speed with which they occurred. In total, more than 3.5 million euros have been invested in the project.

In two years, from a historic but useless and derelict building, an important business center was built in an area of the city that promises to make a historical leap of rehabilitation and urban transformation in the near future.

With the São João Theatre rehabilitated about a year and a half ago, with several buildings from that area also recovered from ruins into hotels, the Batalha area is witnessing a marvellous transformation, mostly private, but where the State and the Municipality have also played a key role.