Cultural places in Portugal

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Lisbon, the National Museum of Ethnology shows how a museum can preserve objects and, at the same time, the very history of Portuguese anthropology. Created in 1965 under the impetus of Jorge Dias and a decisive generation of researchers, it was born with an unusual ambition: to represent the cultures of the world without limiting itself to Portugal or to the former overseas territories. The current building, inaugurated in 1976, houses collections gathered through fieldwork and accompanied by photographic, film and sound archives that give them context and depth. More than a parade of rarities, the visit gains strength in the visible storage galleries and the small permanent displays, where rural tools, popular instruments, masks, puppets and dolls reveal very different ways of living, celebrating and imagining. Between the Rural Life Gallery, Amazonia and pieces from Indonesia, it becomes clear that this museum does not look at cultures as distant curiosities: it brings gestures, knowledge and memories closer together, and makes that closeness its true strength.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

On the banks of the Tagus, in Belém, MAAT shows how the idea of the future can rise from the city’s industrial memory. Opened in 2016, the museum brings together the former Tejo Power Station, a thermoelectric plant built in 1908 that supplied Lisbon with electricity for decades, and MAAT Gallery, designed by Amanda Levete to open the building to the river and to the movement of pedestrians. Between the preserved machinery of The Electricity Factory and the temporary exhibitions of art, architecture and technology, the visitor encounters two very different modernities: that of the energy that powered urban expansion, and that of today’s questions about how we live, build and imagine the future. The accessible roof, conceived as an extension of public space, strengthens this rare idea of a museum that is crossed through as much as it is visited. Along the same route, the brick of the power station and the low profile of the gallery seem to speak to one another about light, labour and transformation.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Belém, Quake turns the most traumatic day in Lisbon’s history into an experience that brings together memory, science and imagination. Dedicated to the earthquake of 1755, it follows the chain of events that destroyed much of the city - the tremor, the tsunami and the fires - and shows how, from that ruin, a new Lisbon emerged, with the Pombaline rebuilding and the systematic use of anti-seismic solutions. Rather than simply displaying objects, the visit uses immersive rooms, simulators, video and interactive devices to convey the human and urban scale of the catastrophe. But Quake does not look only to the past. Its mission is also to explain seismic phenomena and to remind visitors that Portugal remains in an active zone, where preparation can make a difference. Between the lost city of the eighteenth century and the questions of the present, this is a place where the past appears not as a distant ruin, but as warning, knowledge and transformation.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In the Palacete de Santa Catarina, the Pharmacy Museum tells the story of healthcare as a long human adventure. Opened in Lisbon in 1996 on the initiative of the Portuguese Pharmacies, it grew out of a collecting campaign launched in 1981 to save the objects, memories and techniques of a discreet yet essential profession. The visit is distinctive because it blends science, display and history: from the eighteenth-century apothecary to the Liberal Pharmacy of the early twentieth century, from a traditional pharmacy from Macao to the area devoted to military pharmacy, each reconstruction shows how ways of preparing, storing and trusting remedies have changed. Among pieces from very distant civilisations and objects linked to the Endeavour space shuttle and the Mir station, it becomes clear that the museum is not only about jars and formulas; it is about how each age tried to overcome pain, fear and disease.

Stadium • Lisboa, Lisboa

At Luz, the world of Sport Lisboa e Benfica shows how a club founded in 1904 grew beyond the pitch and became a place of memory in Lisbon. The current stadium, opened in 2003 beside the former ground of 1954, was built for Euro 2004 and quickly gained international weight: it hosted the final of that tournament and later staged the Champions League finals of 2014 and 2020. Its arched roof, designed to let light enter, helps explain why the space is experienced almost like a civic cathedral. Next door, the Benfica Museum Cosme Damião extends that story through trophies, documents and objects that tell more than a century of sporting history. Between the stands, the tunnel and the memory held here, it becomes clear that this is not only the home of a club: it is a place where collective passion, architecture and a sense of belonging have taken lasting form.

Stadium • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Alvalade, the stadium of Sporting Clube de Portugal shows how football architecture can become part of a city’s memory. Opened in August 2003, next to the club’s former ground, it was created to give Sporting a home equal to its ambition, and it quickly gained international prominence by hosting five matches of Euro 2004 and, the following year, the UEFA Cup final. Yet what leaves the strongest impression is not only the calendar of major fixtures. It is the way the stands, the pitch and the inner corridors preserve the identity of a club founded in 1906 and deeply linked to the idea of sporting eclecticism. Between the dominant green, the closeness of the crowd and the memory of decisive nights, the stadium appears not only as a stage for competition: it stands as a place where belonging, emotion and collective history continue to find a very physical expression.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Terreiro do Paço, Lisboa Story Centre tells the story of the city without display cases or excessive solemnity: here, Lisbon appears as a living narrative. The visit, organised into six areas and seventeen chapters, follows the city from its founding myths and early peoples to global Lisbon, the earthquake of 1755 and the Pombaline rebuilding, all guided through audio and scenic, visual and sensory devices. Its most striking moment is usually the immersive experience devoted to the earthquake, which gives visitors a sense of the shock’s violence and the scale of the destruction. But the centre is not confined to catastrophe. Ending beside Praça do Comércio, it recalls that this square was a stage for power, trade and public life, and that the city itself was shaped by successive layers of destruction, reinvention and memory. More than displaying objects, Lisboa Story Centre stages the biography of Lisbon.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Campo Grande, Palácio Pimenta reveals Lisbon from within a place that is itself already part of the city’s history. Built between 1744 and 1748 as an eighteenth-century summer residence, probably on the initiative of King João V, it still preserves the memory of the old estate and of the aristocratic taste for gardens and retreat beyond the centre. Since the building was adapted into a museum in the 1970s, it has become the headquarters of the Museum of Lisbon, with a journey that follows the city from prehistory and Roman times to Baroque, Pombaline and contemporary Lisbon. Among archaeology, painting, cartography, tiles and the great model of Lisbon before the 1755 earthquake, visitors sense that the city cannot be told through a single monument, but through successive layers of life, destruction and reinvention. Outside, the gardens extend that reading with an unexpected calm.

Church • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Bairro Alto, the Church and Museum of São Roque show how a sober façade can conceal one of Lisbon’s greatest artistic surprises. Linked to the former Jesuit professed house, the church was the first Jesuit church in Portugal and one of the rare buildings in the city to survive the 1755 earthquake almost intact. Its single nave, designed for preaching, opens onto richly decorated side chapels filled with Mannerist tiles, painting and gilded woodwork. The most famous is the Chapel of St John the Baptist, commissioned by King João V in Rome, blessed by Pope Benedict XIV and brought to Lisbon in three ships, in an episode that gives the site an unexpectedly European scale. Next door, the São Roque Museum, founded in 1905, extends the visit with sacred art, objects from Asia and the treasure connected to the chapel, showing how faith, power and global circulation also shaped this Lisbon hill.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In the west wing of the National Palace of Ajuda, in Lisbon, the Royal Treasure Museum preserves an essential part of the material memory of the former Portuguese Royal House. Opened on 1 June 2022, it presents more than one thousand pieces, including Crown jewels, insignia, decorations, coins and works of civil and religious goldsmithery. The permanent exhibition is organised into eleven sections, arranged over three floors of a large vault, following themes such as the gold and diamonds of Brazil, Crown coins and medals, honorary orders, the Royal Chapel, the Royal Table and the journeys of the Treasure. The jewellery section recalls that the “Crown Jewels” were created in 1827, after the division of King João VI’s estate, and used by successive sovereigns until 1910. In the former palace of Portugal’s last kings, the brilliance of the pieces reveals power, ceremony and private life.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In the Convent of Nossa Senhora de Jesus, in Lisbon, the Geological Museum preserves a chapter of Portuguese scientific history. Its origins date back to 1859, when the Geological Commission of the Kingdom settled in this building and gathered specimens collected during the country’s geological work. Fossils, rocks, minerals and archaeological objects formed collections that remain connected to research, inherited from the Geological Commissions, the Geological Services of Portugal, the Geological and Mining Institute and today’s LNEG. Among the names associated with this early impulse are Carlos Ribeiro, Nery Delgado, Pereira da Costa and Paul Choffat. This is identified as the place where Portuguese Geology and Archaeology were born. The museum’s interest lies not only in its pieces: the arrangement of the collections, the display furniture and the interior architecture preserve the museological language of the 19th century. Part of the Portuguese Museum Network and classified in 2010 as a Property of Public Interest, it is also a rare testimony to the scientific museography of that time.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Museum of Communications, in Lisbon, is the public face of the Portuguese Communications Foundation and preserves the material memory of a sector that has accompanied the country’s history for centuries. The collection has deep roots: in 1878, guidelines from the Ministry of Public Works, Commerce and Industry led to the creation of the “Postal Museum”, begun with thirty pieces. Today, the heritage includes objects from the 16th century to the present day and is organised into three major areas: postal collections, telecommunications collections, and artistic and philatelic collections. The permanent exhibition “Overcoming Distance – Five Centuries of Communications in Portugal” shows how writing, the post, the telegraph, the telephone and other technologies changed the relationship between people and territories. Along the route there are also the Mail Coach, linked to the transport of mail and passengers, and submarine cables, essential to understanding contemporary global communication. It is a museum about the human need to overcome distance.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Campo Grande, Lisbon, the Bordalo Pinheiro Museum was born from the dedication of Arthur Ernesto Santa Cruz Magalhães, a collector and admirer of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro’s work. The house intended to receive the collection was designed by Álvaro Augusto Machado, and the museum opened to the public on 6 August 1916. According to EGEAC, it was the first museum in Portugal built from the ground up to house the work of an artist. Its collection brings together the creations of Rafael and his son Manuel Gustavo, including drawing, engraving, painting, ceramics, tiles, photography, documentation and other objects. The collection, now numbering around 13,200 pieces, shows Bordalo’s satirical, graphic and decorative power, including the famous Zé Povinho, created in 1875. More than a house of homage, the museum preserves a critical and inventive view of Portuguese society in the late 19th century.

Cultural Centre • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Praça das Amoreiras, Lisbon, the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation occupies the former Silk Textile Factory, a spacious Pombaline house linked to an early 20th-century industrial structure. It was Maria Helena Vieira da Silva who chose this building to hold her memory, that of Arpad Szenes and an essential part of her artistic legacy. The idea emerged after Arpad’s death in 1985 and developed from a study centre into a museum dedicated to the two painters. The Foundation was established in 1990 and opened to the public on 4 November 1994. The collection brings together painting, drawing and printmaking, covering Arpad Szenes’s production from 1911 to 1985 and Vieira da Silva’s from 1926 to 1986, with later prints by the artist. The Documentation and Research Centre preserves photographs, correspondence, manuscripts and other materials that extend the study of the couple’s work.

Science Centre • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Parque das Nações, Lisbon, the Pavilion of Knowledge – Ciência Viva occupies the building that, during the 132 days of EXPO’98, housed the Pavilion of Knowledge of the Seas. Designed by João Luís Carrilho da Graça’s studio, it was one of the most visited thematic pavilions of the exhibition, with 2,543,914 visitors. In 1999, the building was assigned to the creation of a space for scientific and technological outreach and reopened to the public, on 25 July, as the Pavilion of Knowledge. Today it is part of the National Network of Ciência Viva Centres and is presented by the network itself as the country’s largest science and technology centre. Across some 4,000 square metres, exhibitions on Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology and Social Sciences are combined with interactive modules, laboratories, talks and experimental activities. The architecture received the Valmor and Municipal Architecture Prize in 1998.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

On Rua de São Bento, in Lisbon, the Amália Rodrigues House-Museum preserves the house where the artist lived for more than four decades. Open to the public since 2001, it maintains the domestic atmosphere connected to her personal and artistic life, giving concrete form to the wish to preserve and share her legacy. The Amália Rodrigues Foundation, established by the singer’s own will, has the mission of protecting, studying and disseminating her work, her contribution to fado and Portuguese culture. Inside, memory appears through personal objects, documents, photographs, letters, press cuttings, decoration diplomas, manuscripts and poems. Among these materials are versions of lyrics such as “Ó Gente da Minha Terra” and “Quando Se Gosta d’Alguém”. More than a biographical evocation, the house reveals the link between Amália’s public voice and the intimacy of a preserved daily life.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Largo do Chafariz de Dentro, Lisbon, the Fado Museum is entirely dedicated to Lisbon’s urban song and to the Portuguese Guitar. It opened to the public on 25 September 1998, celebrating fado as an expression linked to the city’s identity and to the country’s cultural history. Housed in a former Water Pumping Station, built in the second half of the 19th century, the building was restored and extended by the architects João and José Daniel Santa-Rita. The permanent exhibition follows the history of fado and the Portuguese guitar, while the documentation centre, auditorium and school extend research, learning and practice. The collection brings together estates of performers, authors, composers, musicians, instrument makers, scholars and researchers. Since 2011, fado has been included on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the museum played a central role in the nomination.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

Near Lisbon Cathedral, the Aljube Museum — Resistance and Freedom occupies a building marked by a long prison history. The name Aljube itself comes from the Arabic al-jubb, associated with a dry well, cistern, dungeon or prison. According to the museum, the building dates back to the Roman and Islamic periods and was, over time, an ecclesiastical jail, a women’s prison and, between 1928 and 1965, a political prison. Created in 2015, the museum is dedicated to the memory of the struggle against the Portuguese dictatorship, which lasted from 1926 to 1974, and to resistance in the name of freedom and democracy. The long-term exhibition presents the history of the building, the regime’s mechanisms of repression and oppression, the opposition movements, the anti-colonial struggle and the path to 25 April 1974. On the lower floor, archaeological remains recall that this place of memory has roots far older than the dictatorship.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

Housed in the former stables and warehouses of Belém Palace, in Lisbon, the Museum of the Presidency of the Republic brings republican history closer to the country’s public life. The idea emerged at the end of António Ramalho Eanes’s term: in 1986, the President opened a section in the Palace with 84 State gifts. In 2000, the Organic Law of the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic formally created the Museum, dedicated to the dissemination and historical research of the presidential institution. The present building was inaugurated by Jorge Sampaio on 5 October 2004. The collection contains around 4,500 pieces, including State gifts, personal objects, decorations, vehicles and movable heritage from the presidential palaces. The route presents, among other sections, the Gallery of Official Portraits, the Portuguese Honorary Orders and the powers of the President of the Republic. In the same complex, Belém Palace has been the official presidential residence since the establishment of the Republic.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Praça Afonso de Albuquerque, in Belém, the Royal Riding Hall preserves the equestrian memory of the Portuguese court and the museological birth of the National Coach Museum. The building was constructed in 1787 by the Italian architect Giacomo Azzolini and, in 1905, became the space chosen to house the Royal Coach Museum, inaugurated on the initiative of Queen D. Amélia. For this new function, the former riding hall was adapted by the court architect Rosendo Carvalheira, with the collaboration of the painters José Malhoa and Conceição e Silva. After the establishment of the Republic in 1910, the collection grew with vehicles from the former Royal House and Church property; in 1911, the museum became known as the National Coach Museum. The hall designed by Raul Lino, inaugurated in 1944, expanded the exhibition space. Today, the Royal Riding Hall retains coaches, berlins, portraits of the royal family and cavalry accessories.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In the heart of Chiado, the National Museum of Contemporary Art – Museu do Chiado follows Portuguese art from 1850 to the present day. It was founded by decree of the Republic on 26 May 1911, when the former National Museum of Fine Arts was divided between art produced before 1850, assigned to the National Museum of Ancient Art, and later works, installed in the Convent of São Francisco. Its location links the museum to an area of Lisbon frequented by artists and intellectual circles from the generations represented in the collection. After the Chiado fire in 1988, the works were removed as a precaution, and the museum reopened on 12 July 1994, renovated by Jean-Michel Wilmotte. The collection brings together painting, sculpture, drawing, video, photography and installation, spanning Romanticism, Naturalism, Modernism and contemporary creation. Between building, collection and urban memory, the MNAC reads Lisbon through the history of Portuguese art.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

On Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, Casa dos Bicos is one of the five branches of the Museum of Lisbon and houses, on the ground floor, an archaeological centre devoted to the city’s history. The building was constructed in the 16th century by order of D. Brás de Albuquerque, inspired by Italian Renaissance models, among them the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. The façade, classified as a National Monument, owes its name to the stones carved into diamond points, whose texture contrasts with the irregular arrangement of the openings. Inside, the remains reveal several layers of Lisbon, from the Roman occupation to the 18th century. Sections of wall, fish-salting tanks and everyday objects can be seen. On the upper floors, granted to the José Saramago Foundation, the house extends its cultural life. Between architecture, archaeology and urban memory, Casa dos Bicos shows Lisbon as a city built upon successive histories.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Chiado, Lisbon, the MUP – Police Museum occupies part of the former Convent of São Francisco, a building that served as the headquarters of the PSP’s Lisbon Metropolitan Command. Inaugurated in July 2023, it presents the exhibition “The Public Security Police in History”, devoted to the PSP’s path from the creation of the civil police in 1867 to the present day. The museum grew out of the project “Public Security Police: History and Heritage”, developed in partnership between the PSP National Directorate and NOVA FCSH, with the aim of studying, organising and musealising the institution’s historical collections. The route connects the police’s organisational, functional and cultural evolution with the political and social history of contemporary Portugal. Among documents, photographs, objects, videos and multimedia resources, the idea of the “giro” stands out: the urban round that marked the police’s earliest duties in the streets of the cities.

Cultural Centre • Lisboa, Lisboa

At the Casa dos Bicos, in Lisbon, the José Saramago Foundation brings together the writer’s memory and a long urban history. Established by José Saramago in June 2007, the foundation is dedicated to literature and culture in the Portuguese language, to promoting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to defending the environment. Since June 2012, it has been based in this building on Rua dos Bacalhoeiros, commissioned in 1523 by Brás de Albuquerque, son of Afonso de Albuquerque, after a journey to Italy. The façade, classified as a National Monument, is distinguished by stones carved into diamond points, in Renaissance taste, and by windows inspired by the Manueline language. The house has had private and public uses, was once used as a cod warehouse, and today hosts the permanent exhibition dedicated to Saramago’s life and work. On the ground floor, the archaeological centre reveals traces of Lisbon from the Roman occupation to the present day.