Museu do Mar Rei Dom Carlos I

In Cascais, the King D. Carlos Sea Museum tells the story of the town through what shaped it most deeply: the sea. Housed in the former Sporting Club de Cascaes, founded in 1879 on the initiative of the then Prince Carlos, the museum was created in 1976 and opened to the public in 1992, turning a nineteenth-century leisure venue into a place of maritime memory. Its name is more than a tribute: it recalls the king who made Cascais the base for his oceanographic campaigns and helped bring science closer to the observation of the ocean. Inside, the old Octagonal Room stands alongside collections of natural history, underwater archaeology, fishing ethnography and navigation, forming a broad portrait of a town of kings and fishermen. More than gathering shells, boats or nets, this museum shows how the sea was labour, knowledge, risk and imagination, and how it still defines the identity of Cascais.