The Alfena Cultural Centre is housed in an old primary school, built on the initiative and at the expense of Comendador Manuel Martins Ferreira de Matos. As a school building, it was inaugurated on 27 June 1927. In memory of Comendador Manuel Matos’s only daughter, who died at the age of twenty, the new primary school, which costed 300,000 escudos, was given the name Idalina Matos, represented in a bust placed at the top of the school’s central body. The space housed two classrooms, two teachers’ rooms, a gym and games field, gardens, a school avenue and had water from a mine.