If the job of Royal Snowman appeals, you’re a couple of centuries late to apply, but the story of Portugal’s royal ice factory – and how kings and queens got their ice cream – still intrigues curious folk. Like me.
We had seen highway signs north of Lisbon for the Real Fábrica do Gelo. We jokingly called it the Royal Jello Factory, but it really translates to “Royal Ice Factory.” Unique in Portugal, the factory was established in the early 1700s high up on the Montejunto mountain to make ice and transport it to Lisbon so the royals and wealthy families could have cooling summer iced treats and ice cream. Third in line for ice was a hospital. Fascinating stuff.
After months of saying we should investigate, we finally did. (It’s definitely worth a visit for those who weary of Portugal’s plethora of churches, cathedrals, castles and monasteries.)
Why was an ice factory needed?
The silo building sat up the hill from the freezing tanks.
We wondered why an ice factory had been needed, but our question revealed our Canadian bias.
Before the advent of refrigerators and freezers, people in Canada simply cut ice blocks from the more-than-plentiful frozen lakes and rivers in wintertime and stored the blocks in sawdust in ice houses for use in summer. Rich and poor alike could have ice. The idea of having to actively manufacture ice in winter, and that it was just for rich people, made us Canadians furrow our brows.
In warmer Portugal, water generally freezes in wintertime only on mountaintops and in the far north. To get ice to the royal family and hangers-on in Lisbon and Sintra in the summertime, a factory was needed close by to make and store the blocks.
The court-appointed Royal Snowman did just that.
This fancy new ice factory was high-tech for the times. In the 1700s, and for the next hundred years or so, even with the ice factory, ice in summertime was still a rarity. It was called “white gold,” something that only the very rich could afford.
On a bright, sunny, yet cold and windy day in January, we experienced the exact conditions that made the Royal Snowman choose this spot – high on the Serra de Montejunto, where the cold, humid winds blowing off the Atlantic Ocean funnel upwards.
Visits are by guided tour only, which we discovered when we arrived. The nice man in the reception office said to come back in an hour for the 3:30 p.m. tour (others leave at 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.). So, we donned hats and gloves and wandered around the picnic area (which would be lovely in summer), the environmental interpretation centre, and along on a 1.8-kilometre biodiversity hiking loop, before heading back.
A busload of Portuguese seniors arrived, turning us from being the sole visitors to being part of a group. We joined them on a guided walking tour of the three distinct areas of the factory: the freezing tanks, the pumphouse and the silo building.
Freezing tanks
As we entered the factory grounds, we walked along the series of freezing tanks. Note the holes that connected one to the next. Portuguese Air Force buildings sat behind the fence at the back.
Our friendly tour guide unlocked the gate and we walked down a path beside 44 stone freezing tanks.
Fortunately, we had read the English website information ahead of time because the tour was completely in Portuguese. All the information panels had both English and Portuguese, which also helped. We know enough Portuguese to understand what our guide was talking about, but we missed the subtleties and funny stories he clearly told the group.
The shallow freezing tanks are connected by holes in their walls, so the water from the pumphouse would have cascaded from one to the next.
“At the time, it was a highly sophisticated engineering system,” said the website.
When winter nights were cold enough for water to freeze, the factory guard rode part-way down the mountain to the village of Pragança, blowing a bugle to alert the men. The first 30 to leap out of their warm beds and hike up to the factory got paid to break apart and gather sheets of ice (called caramel or ice plaques) from the tanks and carry them in baskets uphill to the storage tanks. That would have been cold, miserable work.
“The mountain community needed this source of income, just as the nobility and high society of Lisbon needed ice to cool off in the summer,” said the website. “The ‘white gold,’ highly sought after by the elites, was a desirable commodity and contributed to the economic and social development of the Serra de Montejunto.”
Donkey-powered pumphouse
Inside the ruined pumphouse, wheels had been driven by donkeys to raise water from wells. To the right is the edge of the reservoir.
Next came the pumphouse, in ruins today. Inside the walls, we saw circular structures where donkeys would have walked around and around, driving wheels attached to buckets that brought water up from the wells. The water was poured into a gutter that drained into a large stone reservoir, built beside the pumphouse.
“It was a sophisticated structure for its time, combining animal power with human technique,” said the website.
Two, or possibly three, wells provided water to the reservoir. When the temperature was right, water flowed from the reservoir into the freezing tanks.
Ice storage in silos
St. Anthony of the Snow overlooked the entrance to the Casa dos Silos. Note the inscription below him from 1789.
From the pumphouse, we hiked a short uphill path to see where the ice had been stored. The Casa dos Silos (Silos House) is the fanciest of the factory buildings.
Just above the arched door, a lighter stone inscription commemorated when Royal Snowman Julião Pereira de Castro bought and renovated the factory in 1789. Above the inscription, a statue of St. Anthony of the Snow perched in the pediment.
Inside the Casa dos Silos, lighted exhibit boxes outlined the factory’s history.
We entered the cold, stone building – it seemed colder than outside – into a large rectangular room. Off to the right were several barred windows. We peered down into three deep underground silos where the ice had been compacted and stored. Metal pulleys were embedded in the concrete above each window. Wooden shovels and rakes stood propped in a corner, along with replica ice blocks wrapped in burlap.
We didn’t see it, but nearby had been a lime kiln, to produce lime to whitewash the freezing tanks and silos in an attempt to keep the ice clean.
We looked down through barred windows into silos where the ice had been stored.
Lighted exhibit boxes in the centre of the room told the factory’s history and included many interesting photos:
- A round crystal plate with a loop handle is a Snowball Dish, made by the French Baccarat factory. Engraved with the monogram of Queen Maria Pia, the dish now resides in the National Palace of Sintra.
- A man unloading a long block of ice from a cart in Lisbon.
- The famous Café Gelo on Rossio Square in Lisbon in 1961. The photo is now in the Lisbon Municipal Archive.
- An aerial photo that shows another set of freezing tanks before the Portuguese Air Force built warehouse-like buildings over top in the 1950s.
- A tile mosaic (see main photo) showed servants offering trays of ice cream and other treats to a jewel-bedecked lady.
If you thought, like me, that the history of ice cream goes back just to the late 1800s or so, you’d be wrong. (My Canadian bias intruded again.) Persians developed the technology to make and store ice in about 550 BCE. Ice and sweet treat recipes migrated from there through the Middle East to Europe. More modern claims for the first ice-cream recipes came at almost the same time in the 1690s from Italy and France.
So, who was this Royal Snowman?
Bundled up with my white tuque, I looked somewhat like a snowman myself as we listened to our tour guide before entering the Casa dos Silos.
References to a snowman go back to at least 1619, when Paulo Domingues signed a contract for four loads of snow to be delivered to the royal palace. Snow was also sold in Lisbon in Terreiro do Paço, now called Praça do Commercio.
Ninety years later, an Italian man won a petition to build an ice factory and have a 20-year monopoly on the business of supplying ice to the royals, but there’s no mention of where it was built or what happened to it.
In 1717, the position of Royal Snowman (“Neveiro” in Portuguese) was created, and Eugénio da Cunha was the first – a middleman who made sure ice or snow got to the royal household and their hangers-on in Lisbon and Sintra.
A brief pause here for a Portuguese lesson – interesting for those of us trying to master the language and understand why the iceman was called a snowman.
In Portuguese, “neve” means snow, and “Neveiro” was the position. However, “neveiro” has several translations even on the factory’s website: snowman, snowmaker, snow trader, snow collector, snow merchant. This despite the fact that “gelo” means ice; the website refers mostly to the “fábrica da neve” (snow factory), rather than ice factory.
Before the ice factory had been invented, people collected and stored natural snow, so the reference to snow persisted in the names, explained the website. “In addition to the chief snowman of the Royal House, there were the city snowmen and the village snowmen.”
In 1741, snowman partners João Rose and Pedro Fracalanza built the ice factory at Montejunto, which had the right climatic conditions and was close to Lisbon. Forty years later, in 1782, Royal Snowman Julião Pereira de Castro expanded and modernized the factory.
Transporting ice to Lisbon
Paddles and (faux) ice blocks wrapped in burlap stood near windows to see down into the silos where the ice was stored until summer, then transported to Lisbon.
When temperatures rose, it was time to transport the ice to Lisbon, just 40 kilometres away. Workers insulated the ice in straw and then burlap, and loaded it onto carts pulled by donkeys down the mountain to the edge of the Tejo River. There, the ice was loaded onto boats, called snow boats, and carried downriver to Lisbon.
Snow boats pulled up to docks at what is now the Praça do Commercio, where they were unloaded. If the docks were overly busy, snow boats got priority after King José I issued a royal charter to that effect.
Ice blocks went first to the nearby warehouse at the Casa da Neve. Then they were distributed to the royal court and a small number of upscale cafés where wealthy people could indulge in cooling treats.
Ice was also taken to the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos (All Saints Royal Hospital) for “therapeutic” uses; no further details available. The hospital faced Rossio Square and occupied the area that today is the Praça da Figueira. The hospital was damaged in the 1755 earthquake and never fully rebuilt.
Cafés in Lisbon
Look for the word “Neve” that still advertises the icy treats that used to be for sale in Conservaria Pomona (the words on a slant) in Lisbon.
Lisbon still has some reminders about the ice factory and its expensive commodity that only the rich could afford back then. Wealthy people got their frozen treats in elegant cafés that often had “neve” or “gelo” in their names.
- Conservaria Pomona: The stone streetcorner of Rua da Prata and Rua de São Nicolau bears an inscribed advertisement for Pomona’s specialties. “Neve” meant a variety of icy treats (similar to how we would use the word “pastry”). We had passed by there many times during our various trips into Lisbon and hadn’t realized the corner’s significance until we visited the Royal Ice Factory. Pomona specialized in conserving fruits in syrup as well as neve.
- Café Gelo: A place with the same name exists today, but it’s not clear if it’s the same place that was in Rossio Square.
- Casa da Neve: Initially called the “House of Snow,” this café is now called Martinho da Arcada and you can go there still today, facing Praça do Commercio. Again, we’d had coffees and pastries there before knowing its connection to the ice factory. Strawberry ice cream became famous there, esteemed Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa hung out there, and, more importantly, ice blocks unloaded from the snow boats went there first. Then the ice was distributed to the Royal household, other cafés, and the hospital. The café was owned by Julião Pereira de Castro, the Royal Snowman who had expanded the ice factory. According to the café’s website, he had unveiled a sign saying “Casa da Neve” in gold lettering to the sound of fanfare. The position of royal Snowman was handed down within Julião´s family until, in 1829, the café was renamed Martinho da Arcada. Martinho Bartolomeu Rodrigues was the last Royal Snowman.
Decline, and global warming
While waiting for the guided tour to begin, we hiked part of a 1.8-km biodiversity loop trail. Eight large information panels described the plants, birds and insects to be seen.
After 1850, when the refrigerator was invented, the importance of the ice factory began to decline, although it didn’t officially close until 1885. A century later, in 1986, the first work to restore the factory began, and it was designated a National Monument in 1997.
However, the real issue that hangs over the factory is global warming. Even if anyone wanted to start producing ice there again – as a sort of historical re-enactment – it would be impossible. Water has not frozen there since 2010.
“This is a warning that should not be ignored,” said one of the exhibits.
Perhaps, as water becomes scarce and temperatures rise, natural ice will once again become a rare and precious commodity.
That’s food for thought, but it’s not sweet like ice cream.
From the ice factory, we headed west down the Montejunto mountain and saw a beautiful sunset from the curving road.
We visited the Real Fábrica do Gelo in January 2026. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.
In an age when everything is readily obtained, this story is fascinating in its complexity! I remember Harry Tripp, the iceman of Woodland Beach, Ontario, who delivered ice to our family cottage!
Thanks for the wonderful detail! Happily today, ice cream is available to all!
Yes, my talk of the iceman has triggered trips down memory lane for many readers, including my mother! Thanks for your comment and enjoy that ice cream!
Fascinating! It brings back fond memories of my childhood growing up in Montreal. The iceman would visit every week to walk up a long flight of outdoor steps to our second-floor duplex apartment carrying a huge block of ice perched on his shoulder, which was cushioned by a thick black leather pad. Using the tongs with which he carried the ice block from his horse and wagon parked in the lane behind our building, he would carefully slide the precious frozen block into the bottom of our small ice chest. We acquired our first electric “Frigidaire” when I was about five, in 1953 or so, putting that strong, hard-working “snowman” out of work. Unfortunately for him, that was the end of an era. But what a difference it made to keeping our food fresher. And my Mom didn’t have to go grocery shopping quite as often, which was sometimes almost daily in the heat of summer, or so it seemed. In your excellent-as-always description, I noticed the name “João Rose.” Very interesting! My Mother’s family name was “Rose.” I didn’t know our family might have a Portuguese connection. (kidding!) Actually, I know it was either Irish or Scottish – or both – but I found that similarity interesting, nevertheless. Finally, I marvelled at your mention of a forty-mile trip (!), using donkeys (!), to deliver the ice to Lisbon. Donkeys don’t move that quickly. I wonder how much ice melted and dripped along the way. If it was a really hot day, perhaps their Majesties might have ended up with just enough for a few ice cubes to cool their drinks! 😉 Thanks again for another wonderful installment!! Keep on learning, sharing with us, and travelling. (And smiling, as Dear Moe no doubt would add.) From this armchair explorer to you and yours: have a healthy, happy, and wonderful 2026! All the best from Canada, eh?
I wondered the same, about how much the ice would melt on the way to Lisbon. The donkeys pulled the ice wagons just part of the 40 kilometres, down the mountain to the river, while the boats did the rest. I would think the boats were faster than the poor donkeys.
We wish you all the best for 2026, as well, eh?!