Almost 50 years ago, brothers José and António Viana, sons and grandsons of fishermen, put their family name on the wooden shipbuilding industry. In their shipyard, which specialises in the construction and restoration of wooden boats, their love of the craft continues to shine through. Master José Viana shares stories and projects with us. Whether on a boat of many meters or on a replicated vessel on a reduced scale, transportable by hand, you can see the depth of his knowledge and the absolute rigor of his execution.
Associated with the Vila do Conde shipyards, the Viana brothers’ shipyard has the particularity of being the only one based in the Póvoa de Varzim fishing port, although it still belongs to the Vila do Conde municipality. It is also the only one to maintain a traditional slipway, a living memory worth discovering, even though its size prevents larger boats from docking.
Almost 50 years ago, brothers José and António Viana, sons and grandsons of fishermen, put their family name on the wooden shipbuilding industry. In their shipyard, which specializes in building and repairing wooden boats, their love of the craft continues to shine through.
In the first decades of activity, the company had up to 25 employees. Especially during the closed fishing season, when the boats stayed ashore, there was “a lot of repair work”, says José Viana, which didn’t stop “two or three boats a year” from being built. The last one built, 19 years ago, is still active.
By 2003, with the cutback in the issuing of licenses to build fishing boats and the reduction in demand for wooden vessels, the service was declining. “Today I work with my brother and my godson”. Few, but good, one might say. And the door is still open: “We do any kind of maintenance on wooden boats. If one comes up to build, we build it.”
The master builder who dominates the project
We may have lost an engineer, but we gained a master builder who has mastered this know-how like few others. He learnt by doing and from the wodge of books he acquired. In fact, he never stopped investing in learning, in his own way: “Today, it’s easy for me. I can unlock all the secrets of my profession, but that doesn’t mean I know everything – I still have a lot to learn. And I always want to go further. I like challenges.”
The story of this family business is José Viana’s life journey. After completing primary school, he was prevented from continuing his education. Those born fishermen will never become doctors, his father used to say. Despite this, he created his own destiny. At the age of 11 he began working as a carpenter in the building trade, but the dream was different: he wanted naval carpentry.
“I was 14 when I asked Master Samuel [founder of the Samuel & Filhos shipyard] to employ me as an apprentice,” he says. There he learnt everything he could: “After three years, I already knew how to ‘galivar’ [to draw in the wood with molds]; all the creation of the skeleton of the boats was already in my hands.”
With this baggage of knowledge, at 17 he went to Mozambique, where a year later he established himself as a shipbuilder. There he did his military service in the Engineering Regiment, and was challenged by his officers to go back to school. But there was no time for him. Besides, he knew what he wanted: “this art. I was still very young, but when work came up I had to do it”. In early 1970 he set up his shipyard in Lourenço Marques, now Maputo.
With Portuguese decolonization, he returned to his birthplace. “I left what I had in Mozambique and came back to start all over again, always with the intention of working for myself. I set up this shipyard with my brother.”
We may have lost an engineer, but we gained a master builder who has mastered this know- how like few others. He learnt by doing and from the wodge of books he acquired. In fact, he never stopped investing in learning, in his own way: “Today, it’s easy for me. I can unlock all the secrets of my profession, but that doesn’t mean I know everything – I still have a lot to learn. And I always want to go further. I like challenges.”
With this in mind, he argues that naval carpentry “takes time to learn. Now, people who come to this craft think they know everything in a year – and they know nothing! It takes eight to nine years to train a good carpenter”. If someone wants to be a professional of the calibre of José Viana, who has long known how to design and scratch build a boat, it will take longer.
He always developed the designs for the boats he built. His work, when inspected, has never been faulty. When it comes to scratching and composing the parts, if one listens to the master, what is complex even seems simple. Take the case of the creation of the structure:
“It takes time to make the moulds, but then everything works out. With the mould, and through the grid, we drawn the piece. Then it’s just a matter of fitting everything together. When the boat is being assembled, there’s almost no need to sand the wooden structure; at most, we give it a ‘chora’, that is, we use sandpaper because sometimes the wood warps over time, not because there’s a bad fit.”
Every boat remains in the memory
Every boat that is built or that benefits from a remarkable restoration “stays in the heart. They are a piece of us,” says Master Viana. There are many memories and stories that are part of this shipyard. Let’s take a look at two of them.
It was the 1980s when the “Três Sorrisos” (Three Smiles) crashed into the cliffs of Castelo do Queijo in Porto. Unable to sail, this 16-metre boat from the fishing community of Caxinas had to be transported by lorry to the shipyard. “We picked the boat up at midnight and didn’t get here until six in the morning,” due to various mishaps. It has to be said that the transport was carried out at night in order to avoid traffic; it was anything but normal for a boat of that size to be on the road.
Every boat that is built or that benefits from a remarkable restoration “stays in the heart. They are a piece of us,” says Master Viana. There are many memories and stories that are part of this shipyard.
The journey was full of unexpected events, from very tight passages (there was even a “touch” at the shipowner’s own house) to a road cut off due to drainage works. “A huge hole had opened up. We asked the workers to cover it up somehow so we could get through, otherwise we’d have to go round a lot more and pass through very narrow places…” – recalls the master.
“Três Sorrisos” arrived at the shipyard full of sand. “It took us a week just to clean it.” The complex repair went well. So well, in fact, that the boat’s owner subsequently commissioned the two brothers to build a 20 metre covered boat.
Creating bonds with customers is also evident in the story of the “Ki Jung” fishing boat ordered by a foreign couple living in Torres Vedras, a Dutchman and a South Korean woman. It was a strange name that took a long time to be legally approved. It was necessary to indicate what it meant: “rising sun” in the co-owner’s mother tongue.
Ki Jung”, operating in Peniche, returned to the shipyard for maintenance, and with it the owners. One day they had dinner at José Viana’s house. The South Korean lady was dressed in her country’s traditional costume, while the master’s daughter was dressed as a “mordoma”, a typical costume from Viana do Castelo, her mother’s hometown.
From the restoration of the “Cego de Maio” to miniatures… and a surfboard
…the restoration of the “Cego de Maio” lifeboat, a century-old boat on display at the Póvoa de Varzim Municipal Museum. The on-site restoration process, which began in 2018 and was completed in March 2019, was undertaken by Master Viana. He researched and made the boat project (“which didn’t exist”) and over the course of seven months rehabilitated it under the watchful eye of museum visitors, to whom he explained his techniques.
Soon the book on the restoration of the “Cego de Maio” lifeboat, a centenary boat on display at the Póvoa de Varzim Municipal Museum, will be launched. The on-site restoration process, which began in 2018 and was completed in March 2019, was undertaken by Master Viana. He researched and made the project for the boat (“which didn’t exist”) and over the course of seven months rehabilitated it under the watchful eye of museum visitors, to whom he explained his techniques. Plus, he made a point of leaving the nomenclature of all the pieces, so that the knowledge doesn’t get lost.
The “Cego de Maio” restoration is further proof of the master’s excellent talent, as he is also dedicated to creating traditional and antique boats on a reduced scale. His is the small-scale replica of the 16th century ship of Vila de Conde on display at the Alfândega Régia and other vessels that tell the story of wooden shipbuilding.
In what he does, José Viana relishes the challenge of having to research, create solutions and adopt the necessary techniques. So much so that when a group of students from a secondary school in Leça da Palmeira, Matosinhos, asked him in 2023 to make a wooden surfboard – for an entrepreneurship project – he didn’t hesitate. “I said yes straight away. I asked one of the kids for his surfboard to take measurements. I couldn’t find the right wood, which would have to come from Brazil, so I made it out of light pine. If it capsizes in the sea, it won’t sink.” Being the work of who he is, we would never have thought otherwise…
