A proactive approach to the conservation of historic and cultural Heritage: The HeritageCare methodology

Presently, no systematic policy for the preventive conservation of the built cultural heritage exists
in South-West Europe. Current approaches for inspection, diagnosis, monitoring and reactive
conservation are normally intermittent, unplanned, expensive and lack methodical strategy. The
available financial resources are scarce and are mostly addressed to listed buildings. Besides, owners
and stakeholders often reveal reluctance to invest in preventive conservation and maintenance
programs. In view of these considerations, and driven by the principle “prevention is better than
cure”, the HeritageCare project has developed a system for the preventive conservation and
maintenance of the built heritage. The main aim of this paper is to briefly describe the methodology,
including its three levels of service, and present the main results of the implementation and
validation of the service level 1 on a case study belonging to the Portuguese architectural heritage.