the 1870s, the fountain was sold to Luís do Amaral Ferreira, then known as o Alemão (the German), but later passed into the hands of Maria do Carmo Sousa, wife of Luís do Amaral Ferreira (in 1875). By the 1890s, the fountain was the property of José Joaquim de Oliveira, who married Maria do Carmo Sousa. By 1894, José Leite de Vasconcelos visited the Idol's garden, and completed a study of the structure (in a letter date 27 March 1894 to Martins Sarmento). Martins Sarmento, for his part, was interested in creating a mould of the fountain for the Museum of the Sociedade Martins Sarmento, in Guimarães. Leite de Vasconcelos returned a year later to Braga, in order to examine the inscriptions, which had by then become covered in lime: he rectified the obscurity of some of the inscription, re-reading TONGOE rather than PONGOE. Leite de Vasconcelos made return visits in 1903 and 1905 to study the fountain further, hypothesizing that the human figure on the left was the religious practitioner and the image within the structure the divinity. Republic In 1936, the municipal government of Braga, under its president Francisco Araújo Malheiro, acquired the land surrounding the fountain. But, they transferred this title to the State the following year, including the fountain, the surrounding lands and access along Rua do Raio: the Direcção Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais (DGMEN) then demolitioned the public tank, water pipes, encountered an imbrex and tegula and votive inscription. Subsequent repairs occurred in 1952, while access to the space was developed in 1967. In 1980-1981, Alain Tranoy, reassessing Leite de Vasconcelos' original hypothesis, suggested that the left figure on the idol was the divinity, while the enclosed figure the practitioner/devotee. Later, António Rodríguez Colmenero defended that the fountain was part of plural sanctuary, and the figures represented the figures of Nabia and Tongo Nabiago. In 1995, a conservation study of the fountain was undertaken by professors Maria Amélia Sequeiro Braga and Luís Aires de Barros. It was followed in 1999 by an archaeological investigation of the surrounding area, and a 2000-2001, project by architect Paula Silva, in collaboration with Carla Pestana and João Ferreira, to construct a building to preserve the site and act as interpretative centre. In September 2002, a public tender process offered the project to Casimiro Ribeiro e Filhos, Lda. and CARI-Guimarães. It was followed in 2003 by a formal