The Whaling Industry Museum, formerly the Whaling Factory Armação Baleeiras Reunidas, Lda., in São Roque do Pico, is the first public industrial museum of the Azores. The Society of Armação Baleeiras Reunidas, Lda., established in 1942, articulated two production systems: the fishing of the whale (sperm whale) and the production of its derivatives, as well as their marketing. This manufacturing unit, the largest and most important sperm whale processing and processing complex, which worked between 1946 and 1984, is an industrial building with a total area of about 1200 m2.
The main building, where the technical process for the production of oil, flour, fertilizers and vitamins was developed from the processing of bacon, meat, bones and sperm livers, consists of the following equipment: two boilers; four bacon autoclaves; two autoclaves of flesh and bones; hauling winches of bacon; two fuel tanks; two meat and bone dryers; a press; a liver mill; three liver autoclaves; an oil centrifuge; a power station with two generators; a fridge; a pickup truck; a flour mill; equipment for sieving, weighing and bagging flour; underground deposits of whale oil; oil transfer pumps and pipeline pipes.
The Whaling Industry Museum is, therefore, a museum of industrial archaeology. Of ethnographic character are the objects of cutting and cutting/smashing of sperm whales, documentation concerning the activity of the Factory, photographs related to whaling activity and the São Roque do Pico Port, as well as miniature sperm whales and whaling vessels. This industrial musealization - “in situ” -, valued by works of urban and landscape requalification, is assumed as a strategic instrument of integrated development of the Municipality, able to contribute decisively to its cultural and identity promotion, at a local scale as well a regional and national scale too.