Heritage | Lai Chi Vun shipyard to be rebuilt as tourist spot

Authorities have retaken ownership of three properties in the Lai Chi Vun area, close to Coloane village, a district that previously held traditional shipyards. The Cultural Affairs Bureau president Ung Vai Meng plans to use the buildings as a means of showcasing the role that the shipyards had in Macau.
The areas reclaimed by the Marine and Water Bureau include one dockyard and two small wooden houses.
Ung said that both the Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) and the Land, Public Works and Transport Bureau held several meetings to discuss the usage of those properties. “They will serve to launch a display of traditions, it will not be too commercial,” explained Ung. Moreover, Ung asserted that research work and cooperation with shipbuilders have already started.
However, IC is not managing the three properties yet, and can’t indicate the exact schedules for the reconstruction due to security issues. Nonetheless, Ung revealed that IC would be dividing the project into two phases: “First, we will repair and reinforce the structures of the three buildings, and only afterwards are we going to consider whether to use them.”
Ung claimed that the authorities expect to increasingly draw people’s attention to traditional shipbuilding technology by setting a good example with this program.
Earlier this month, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, director of the MGTO, mentioned that one idea from the cultural affairs authorities is to invite masters of shipbuilding technology to help turn these houses into a new tourist spot.
Alexis Tam, Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, also informed the media last month that there had been a preliminary idea envisioning these houses as hut exhibitions. Tam believed that such a project could be finished within one to two years.
Last month, some wood pillars of the dockyard were partially broken again, after the ceiling collapsed some time before.
It’s not the first time that proposals to revamp Lai Chi Vun, an area of about 50,000 square meters, have surfaced. In 2012, during a meeting attended by the former Secretary for Transport and Public Works Lau Si Io, it was proposed that the city’s boat-
building industry be resurrected in the form of a cultural tourism product.  As part of that plan, the defunct shipyards in Coloane were to be revived with a ship-building museum showcasing boat- building tools and machinery as exhibits, as well as having on-site workshops, in order to preserve the area, culture and industry that once flourished in Macau.