1. CONTEXT "Take proper care of your monuments and you will not need to restore them. A few sheets of lead put in time upon the roof, a few dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water course, will save both roof and walls from ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation. (...) And do this tenderly, and reverently, and continually, and many a generation will still be born and pass away beneath its shadow." (Ruskin, 1849). So wrote John Ruskin in 1849, inciting others to the good practice of regular maintenance, contrary to the perverse and widespread tendency to leave buildings to ruin and to deep restore them later. Focusing on issues such as "authenticity", "truth", and "aura", Ruskin thus advocated conservation and maintenance practices as mandatory in the sense of being an ethical duty of transmitting heritage to future generations. It is in this perspective, necessarily contextualised, that in the same essay the English scholar openly expressed against "restoration", defining it as "the most total destruction which a building can suffer (....) accompanied with false description" (Ruskin, 1849). Maintenance comes from the Latin word manu-tenere ("to hold in the hand"), which refers to either a continuous care and manual work, intrinsically linked to man and his actions. In other words, a "maintenance culture", which has always existed in the history of construction as an assimilated cultural act and transmitted from generation to generation. It would be the industri- alisation of construction that would reverse the ratio of labour to material costs, thereby encour- aging a practice of replacement instead of repair or maintenance. During the 20th century, the International Charters and Recommendations were also insisting on the propensity of preventive and maintenance actions, as stated by the latest Charter of Kra- kow (2000): "Maintenance and repairs are a fundamental part of the process of heritage conser- vation. These actions have to be organised with systematic research, inspection, control, moni- toring and testing. Possible decay has to be foreseen and reported on, and appropriate preventive measures have to be taken." (ICOMOS, 2000) In the current context, the awareness of the decrease of economic and environmental re- sources available has encouraged a more sustainable safeguarding of the architectural heritage through the implementation of strategies for preventive conservation, monitoring and mainte- Towards maintenance: concepts and Portuguese experiences. Teresa Ferreira Centro de Estudos e Urbanismo – Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto ABSTRACT: The sharp decrease in economic and ecological resources points to a paradigm shift for a more sustainable management of resources, based on the passage of a reactive and exceptional intervention to prevention and continued care over the time. The paper proposes a short introduction about concepts and experiences in the field of maintenance, followed by the presentation of a concrete case study, the Rota do Românico, in the North of Portugal.