Castelo de Castro Marim · 14,000 m² heritage capture
A 14,000 m² 3D virtual tour of the Castelo de Castro Marim and the wider municipal heritage trail — at the time, the largest single Matterport capture on record. Shot with a Leica BLK360, served through our own VRBox platform with a custom interface for the city council.
Brief
The Câmara Municipal de Castro Marim wanted the medieval castle and the surrounding heritage trail to be experienceable online — not just for visitors planning a trip, but for school programmes, researchers, and the diaspora across Europe and Brazil who rarely make it back. The whole site spans 14,000 square metres of ramparts, courtyards, archaeological digs and exhibit spaces.
The challenge: capture the entire footprint at a fidelity that holds up on a 27-inch display, deliver it as a single navigable tour, and let the city council own the look-and-feel — not Matterport's generic skin.
Approach
A Leica BLK360, not a Matterport Pro2.
Standard Matterport hardware tops out before you reach this kind of scale — and outdoor light + irregular stone surfaces will defeat the consumer-tier rigs. We brought in a Leica BLK360 terrestrial laser scanner: millimetre-accurate, daylight-tolerant, designed for survey work. Paired it with a Sony α7 III for HDR photography and a DJI Mavic 2 Pro for the aerial passes the castle footprint demanded.
14,000 m² in a single Matterport space.
The capture ran over multiple shoot days, registered as one continuous walkable tour. At the time of delivery this set the record for the largest single Matterport capture on record — the platform team flagged it internally, and had told us plainly that they did not know whether a space that size would render at all.
Fully customised via VRBox.
We didn't ship the default Matterport UI. The tour runs through our in-house VRBox platform with a custom interface for the Câmara: their branding, their language toggle, a curated tour path with annotated hotspots, and analytics so they can see which parts of the heritage trail get the most attention.
Result
Live since 2021 on the Câmara's tourism channels. The capture set the platform record for largest single Matterport tour at the time, and the heritage trail is now accessible from anywhere — school programmes use it as a curriculum resource, the local tourism office hands the link to inbound enquiries, and the diaspora finally has a way to walk through the castle they've only heard about.