Museums in Portugal

Science Centre • Lisboa, Lisboa

Beside the Jerónimos Monastery, the Navy Planetarium has the rare grace of places that still teach us to look up. Opened in 1965, from an idea by Commander Eugénio Conceição Silva and designed by the architect Frederico George, it was born from the meeting of scientific purpose, naval tradition and the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Its great dome turned it into a true theatre of the sky, where generations of visitors discovered constellations, nebulae and the old art of guiding a journey by the stars. The renovation at the start of the twenty-first century strengthened that immersive experience without erasing the building’s character. It is worth noticing the contrast between the sober exterior and the sense of scale inside the auditorium, where Lisbon seems to disappear for a while. In Belém, among monuments linked to the sea, this planetarium reminds us that navigation has always depended on reading the heavens.

Cultural Centre • Lisboa, Lisboa

Among Belém’s great historic symbols, the Belém Cultural Centre marks the moment when Lisbon decided to inscribe its modernity too into the city’s monumental landscape. Its construction was decided in 1988, in the context of Portugal’s European presidency in 1992, and the project by Vittorio Gregotti and Manuel Salgado imagined a kind of open city, made of buildings, streets, squares and bridges, in dialogue with Praça do Império, the Jerónimos Monastery and the Tagus. During a visit, it is worth exploring the outdoor spaces as much as the auditoriums and exhibition rooms, because the CCB is not understood only from within: it also lives in the light, the voids and the relationship between pale stone and the river. Today, listed as a Monument of Public Interest, it remains one of the places where Lisbon shows, with remarkable ease, that contemporary architecture can also create memory.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

Set inside the former church of Saint Julian, the Money Museum is one of those places where Lisbon reveals itself in layers. Open to the public since 2016, it occupies a building restored as part of the rehabilitation of the Bank of Portugal’s headquarters, and that long biography gives depth to a museum devoted to money, its history and the ways people exchange value. Along the route, coins, banknotes, machines and multimedia displays show how money has shaped trade, power and everyday life, without losing sight of the human scale. Yet two details make the visit especially memorable: the Wall of King Dinis, preserved within the museum, and the gold bar that visitors can touch. Between medieval remains, the old nave of Saint Julian and contemporary museography, the place achieves something rare: it speaks about economics without coldness and shows that behind every coin there is always a story of city, power and imagination.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In the Convento das Bernardas, in Madragoa, the Puppet Museum shows how a small object can hold an entire world. Founded in 1987, it was the first museum in Portugal entirely devoted to puppetry and, since 2001, it has been housed in this former seventeenth-century convent, almost destroyed by the 1755 earthquake and later rebuilt. The collection brings together more than 3,000 pieces across different places, techniques and periods, yet the heart of the visit beats most strongly in the Portuguese traditions, from the Robertos to the Bonecos de Santo Aleixo. Along the way appear shadow puppets, string puppets, rod puppets, African and Asian masks, and even a section linked to animation cinema. It is also worth slowing down to feel the building itself: the cloister, the adapted former church and the atmosphere suspended between theatre and retreat. It is a museum that speaks of childhood, certainly, but also of memory, artifice and the old human desire to give soul to things.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

High on Rua das Janelas Verdes, the National Museum of Ancient Art is one of those places where Portugal seems to tell its own story with unusual clarity. Opened in 1884, to give a home to many works that came from convents and monasteries after the extinction of the religious orders, it was installed in the former Palace of the Counts of Alvor and became the country’s great house of ancient art. Its collection crosses centuries and geographies, from painting to goldsmithing, from sculpture to works from Europe, Africa and the East, yet some encounters ask for real pause: the Panels of Saint Vincent, the Belém Monstrance, the Namban screens. During a visit, it is also worth slowing down in the garden facing the Tagus, where the city seems to breathe differently. Between palace, collection and horizon, the museum leaves a rare impression: that history, when well kept, remains alive.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

On Alcântara’s waterfront, the Orient Museum shows how a former dockside warehouse can become a place where worlds meet. Opened in 2008 inside the modernist building of the former refrigerated cod warehouses, designed from 1939 onwards, it holds two collections that define its character with unusual clarity. On one side, Portuguese Presence in Asia brings together thousands of objects and reveals the fascination, exchange and curiosity that shaped the relationship between Portugal and the East. On the other, the Kwok On collection, regarded as one of the most representative of its kind in Europe, opens a path into the performing arts, rituals and popular religions of a much wider Asia. During a visit, it is worth noticing the contrast between the building’s industrial sobriety and the richness of puppets, masks, folding screens, ivories and ritual objects. Few museums in Lisbon manage to feel at once so calm, so layered and so open to dialogue.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

Stepping into the Carris Museum is like understanding Lisbon in motion. Housed in Santo Amaro Station, Carris’s first station, the museum preserves the memory of a company founded in 1872, intriguingly in Rio de Janeiro, before it transformed the way the capital expanded and overcame its hills. Here, the history of public transport meets the history of the city itself: from horse-drawn streetcars to the funiculars, from the electrification of the network to twentieth-century buses. Among photographs, uniforms, tickets, machinery and historic vehicles, visitors follow the technical, social and urban changes that shaped everyday life in Lisbon. One of the most memorable moments is the journey between the two exhibition areas on a tram from 1901, which gives the visit a rare sense of authenticity. More than a transport museum, this is a place where Lisbon can be seen growing along its rails.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Maritime Museum, housed since 1962 in the wings of Jerónimos Monastery, does more than display vessels: it tells the long intimacy between Portugal and the sea. Created on the initiative of King Luís in 1863, it began with a didactic purpose, yet today the visit feels like a journey through time. Among models, charts, instruments and paintings, visitors sense how the ocean was a route for trade, science, war and imagination. The most striking moment awaits in the Barge Pavilion, built to house full-size boats. There, the Royal Brig stands out for its gilded carving, mythological figures and the Venetian mirrors in its stern cabin, but also for its story: in 1808 it carried the royal family to the squadron that sailed to Brazil and, already in the twentieth century, it returned to the water for the official visit of Queen Elizabeth the Second. Few places show so clearly how the sea helped shape Portuguese power and memory.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The National Coach Museum is one of those places where history seems to pass before your eyes in procession. Created on the initiative of Queen Amélia in 1905 to gather and preserve the royal vehicles scattered across different palaces, it began in the former Royal Riding School of Belém and, more than a century later, gained a new building designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. The collection, regarded as unique in the world, shows how power was displayed on wheels, through luxury, ceremony and diplomacy. Among coaches, berlins and litters, the eye is drawn to the celebrated Coach of the Oceans, one of the museum’s treasures, built for the embassy sent by King João the Fifth to Pope Clement the Eleventh in 1716. Its exuberant carving and allegories linked to the sea and the Discoveries reveal the grand image Portugal wished to project. Visiting this museum is like stepping into a theatre of splendour where memory moves at the solemn pace of horses.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

MAAT Central is one of those places where Lisbon can be understood as a modern city. Formerly the Tejo Power Station, this thermoelectric plant began operating in 1909 and supplied the capital for decades, first continuously and later as a reserve station, before being reborn as a museum space. The building, with its red brick, iron and vast windows, is one of the landmarks of Portuguese industrial architecture, yet what impresses most is stepping inside and finding the original machinery still in place. In the exhibition The Electricity Factory, boilers, turbo-alternators and walkways reveal the almost theatrical scale of energy production and recall the time when coal helped to light Lisbon. Today, as part of the MAAT campus, the former plant has gained a new life without losing its raw force. It is a rare place, where technology, memory and city still speak to one another.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The National Museum of Natural History and Science is one of Lisbon’s most unexpected places: behind the solemn façade of the former Polytechnic School, the city opens itself to curiosity. Heir to the Royal Museum of Natural History and Botanical Garden created in the second half of the eighteenth century, the museum preserves more than 250 years of scientific activity and brings together collections with more than three million objects. Yet the visit never feels like stepping into a static archive. Between galleries, the Lisbon Botanical Garden, integrated into the complex, and the magnificent Laboratorio Chimico, you sense how knowledge was observed, classified and taught. It is worth lingering in that laboratory, a true historical and scientific jewel, where the scale of the space still makes you imagine lessons, experiments and wonder. Few museums show so clearly that science also has architecture, memory and imagination.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Mãe d’Água das Amoreiras Reservoir has the silent grandeur of a place built to protect what a city depends on. At the point where the Águas Livres Aqueduct enters Lisbon, it began to be designed by Carlos Mardel in the mid eighteenth century and was only completed in the following century, which helps explain the striking blend of sobriety and scale it still conveys today. Inside, the deep tank, the four sturdy pillars, the vaults and the water falling from the mouth of a dolphin create an unexpectedly solemn space, almost like a church devoted to engineering. It is also worth noticing the Casa do Registo, where the distribution of water to fountains, convents and noble houses was controlled. And on the terrace, Lisbon opens out with rare clarity. Few places show so well how urban history is also written through water.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In the former Madre de Deus Convent, founded by Queen Leonor in 1509, the National Tile Museum shows how an apparently simple material became one of the most distinctive expressions of Portuguese culture. The route follows the history of the azulejo from the second half of the fifteenth century to the present day, helping visitors understand how this art decorated churches, palaces, houses and public spaces, while also preserving memory. Among the most striking spaces is the Church of Madre de Deus, where gilded woodcarving, painting and tiles create an interior of remarkable richness. There is also one work that holds the eye for a long time: the Grande Panorama de Lisboa, attributed to Gabriel del Barco, a monumental panel that shows the city before the 1755 earthquake. More than a museum visit, coming here feels like reading Lisbon and Portugal surface by surface, century by century.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In the Angeja-Palmela Palace, a former leisure estate in Lumiar, the National Costume Museum shows how clothing can tell the story of a country. Opened in 1977, it brings together around forty thousand garments and accessories, from the eighteenth century to the present day, and follows above all the ways in which the aristocracy, the upper bourgeoisie and the middle classes dressed, represented themselves and changed over time. The original core came from the National Coach Museum and included pieces linked to the Royal Household, a detail that helps explain the richness of the collection. Yet the place does not end in the galleries: the museum extends into the Monteiro-Mor Botanical Park, created in the eighteenth century, with lakes, woodland, a kitchen garden and the first known araucaria in mainland Portugal. Here, costume stops being mere fashion and becomes a living reading of Portuguese society.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Lumiar, the National Museum of Theatre and Dance keeps the living memory of the Portuguese stage. Housed in the eighteenth-century Monteiro-Mor complex, it brings together the country’s most extensive collection on the performing arts, with costumes, set models, props, posters, scores, photographs and archives that reveal centuries of creation, rehearsal and applause. The museum has the rare ability to show theatre not as distant art, but as work shaped by body, voice and imagination. Since the important donation made by José Sasportes in 2015, dance has gained an even more central place here, strengthening the museum’s very identity. During a visit, it is also worth noticing the atmosphere of old Monteiro-Mor: an eighteenth-century aristocratic setting linked to gardens with tropical species and exotic birds. Between memory, study and invention, this is a place that brings us closer to what happens before the curtain rises.

Museum Ship • Almada, Setúbal

Some ships seem to contain an entire empire within them, and the frigate D. Fernando II e Glória is one of them. Built in Daman and launched in 1843, it was the last great ship of the Portuguese Navy to sail entirely under canvas and the last to serve the India Run. Over 33 years it covered more than 100,000 nautical miles in a succession of voyages linking Lisbon to Portugal’s overseas world. It later served as the Naval Artillery School, housed a social institution for disadvantaged boys and, in 1963, was nearly lost in a fire that left it half-submerged. Restored and opened to the public in 1998, it returned as a museum ship. During a visit, it is worth lingering on the main deck, the gun deck and the cabins: among the masts, the teak wood and the cramped spaces, the hardship and scale of life on board become easier to grasp. Remarkably, it never entered combat.

Cultural Centre • Lisboa, Lisboa

More than a museum or a foundation, Gulbenkian is a rare place where Lisbon seems to slow down. Created in 1956 through the will of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, the collector and philanthropist of Armenian origin who chose Lisbon for the last years of his life, the institution brought together art, science, education and charity within a single cultural project. The complex of headquarters, museum and garden, inaugurated in 1969, is a landmark of Portuguese modernism: its restrained volumes of concrete and glass seem to rest upon the greenery, in constant dialogue with the garden designed by Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and António Viana Barreto, one of the most emblematic modern gardens in Portugal. It is worth noticing that rare fusion of architecture, water, trees and silence. Not by chance, the complex received the Valmor Prize and was classified as a National Monument, becoming the first contemporary work to receive that protection in Portugal.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

On Avenida Cinco de Outubro, the Dr Anastácio Gonçalves House-Museum has something rare about it: even before you step inside, it already feels like a work of art. Built in 1904 and 1905 as the home and studio of the painter José Malhoa, it was designed by Norte Júnior and became Lisbon’s first artist’s house, receiving the Valmor Prize as early as 1905. The façade, with the great window of the former studio, the tile friezes and the Art Nouveau details, reveals an architecture conceived for light, for creation and for the pleasure of looking. In 1932, the doctor and collector Anastácio Gonçalves bought the house and turned it into the setting for his remarkable collection, now numbering around three thousand works. During a visit, it is worth sensing that meeting between domestic intimacy and cultivated taste: Portuguese painting, Chinese porcelain, furniture and small objects live together here as though the house were still inhabited by art.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

In Santa Apolónia, the Lisbon Military Museum is surprising because it is not only a museum of weapons: it is also a place where Portuguese military history meets art and the memory of the city. The institution began to take shape in 1842 and was created as the Artillery Museum in 1851, occupying a building linked to the former Royal Army Arsenal, rebuilt in the eighteenth century and later adapted for museum use. Its rooms, richly decorated with painting, carved wood and tilework, give the visit an unexpected solemnity, while collections of weapons, uniforms and military equipment live alongside painting and sculpture. Its collection of bronze artillery pieces is considered one of the most complete in the world. It is also worth lingering in the Plaster Room, where the mould of the statue of King José I in Praça do Comércio is kept. Here, war also appears as culture, image and representation.

Museum • Setúbal, Setúbal

On Avenida Luísa Todi, the Banco de Portugal Municipal Gallery shows just how well Setúbal has reused its urban memory. Designed by Arnaldo Adães Bermudes in the early decades of the twentieth century, the building served for a long time as the local branch of the Bank of Portugal and still retains the solemn air of a former banking house. The two stone columns at the entrance, the eclectic composition and the revivalist echoes, with discreet Art Nouveau touches, give it a sober yet distinctive presence. In 2013, the property began a new life as a municipal gallery and started hosting exhibitions from the Museum of Setúbal. Among them was the celebrated altarpiece from the Convent of Jesus, one of the great works of sixteenth-century Portuguese painting. It is worth studying the building closely before you even step inside: few transformations tell the story of a city so well, turning a place once meant to guard wealth into one that preserves and shares heritage.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

On the edge of the Tagus, the Popular Art Museum preserves one of the clearest images of how Portugal chose to represent itself in the twentieth century. The building grew out of the pavilions of the Popular Life Section of the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition and opened as a museum in 1948, reshaped by Jorge Segurado from a programme defined by Francisco Martins Lage and Tomás de Mello. What makes it singular is not only its collection of ceramics, textiles, musical instruments and agricultural tools: it is also the mural compositions and the dialogue between modernism and tradition, designed to give form to a rural, colourful and idealised country. To step inside is therefore to encounter both an ethnographic collection and a historical document about the aesthetics and political vision of the Estado Novo. Beside the Espelho de Água and the Monument to the Discoveries, the building still suggests that popular memory can also be staged.

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 • Almada, Setúbal

High above Almada Velha, facing Lisbon and the Tagus, Casa da Cerca brings together an old leisure estate and one of the most distinctive cultural projects on the south bank. Built between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the manor house was enlarged over time; in the chapel survive tile panels attributed to Master P.M.P., and in the oldest part there are still traces of a blocked sixteenth-century doorway. After decades of private use and a period of neglect, the building was restored by the municipal council and opened in 1993 as a Centre for Contemporary Art, through the initiative of Rogério Ribeiro, with special attention to drawing. The garden deepens that rare identity: O Chão das Artes, inaugurated in 2001, brings together botany, art and science through plants linked to pigments, fibres, oils and other materials used in artistic creation. Between the white house, the walls and the light on the river, the place has the calm of a belvedere and the curiosity of a laboratory.

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.

Museum • Sintra, Lisboa

At Granja do Marquês, near Sintra, the Air Museum preserves the Portuguese history of flight as a blend of ingenuity, risk and imagination. The idea of creating an aviation museum dates back to the early twentieth century, but the museum opened to the public in 1971, in Alverca, before gaining a new scale in its present Sintra site, inaugurated in 2009. Between spacious hangars and aircraft from different periods, the visit links military and civil aviation and shows how flying changed the country, from the feats of the pioneers to the era of TAP and ANA. One of its most curious details is the replica of Santos Dumont’s 14-bis, presented as the second one in the world. More than a technical collection, the museum preserves a deeply physical memory of the human desire to rise into the air and turn that ambition into history.

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.

Museum • Cascais, Lisboa

In Cascais, almost above the Santa Marta cove, the Casa-Museu de Santa Maria seems to rise from the rock and the light of the sea. Raul Lino designed it in 1902 for Jorge O’Neill, as a gift for his daughter Maria Teresa, in one of the earliest moments of a body of work that already suggests his idea of the Portuguese house, with Mediterranean and Moorish echoes. For about a century it remained a private residence; today, as part of the Museum Quarter, it still keeps that intimate character, more like a lived-in house than a small palace. The interior surprises with its decorative richness: the Hall of Arches, the terrace facing the water, the tiles designed by the architect and, above all, the late seventeenth-century panels brought from a chapel in Frielas give the whole place a quiet and very distinctive beauty. Between windows open to the Atlantic, painted wood and silence, one senses that this house was not meant to dominate the landscape, but to converse with it.

Museum • Cascais, Lisboa

In Cascais, almost above the Santa Marta cove, the Condes de Castro Guimarães Museum shows how a summer residence can become public memory without losing its private charm. The former Tower of São Sebastião was built between 1897 and 1900 on the initiative of Jorge O’Neill, and it became a museum thanks to the legacy of Manuel Inácio de Castro Guimarães, who left the house, the books and its artistic contents to the town for public use. Opened on 12 July 1931, the ensemble preserves a rare atmosphere: rooms with painting, Oriental porcelain, furniture, silver and an organ installed for the Counts’ musical gatherings coexist with the theatrical quality of a revivalist architecture shaped by Neo-Romanesque, Neo-Gothic and Neo-Manueline echoes. The library also holds a quiet treasure: the Chronicle of Afonso Henriques, an illuminated manuscript from 1505 with one of the earliest known representations of Lisbon.

Museum • Cascais, Lisboa

In Cascais, Casa Sommer reveals a side of the town that is less maritime and more urban, shaped by the elegance of the late nineteenth century. Commissioned by Henrique Sommer, this Neoclassical house with a square plan is described by the municipality as the most refined example of a private residence of its kind in Cascais, with symmetrical façades, pilasters, pediments and a noble balcony that give it an almost palatial dignity. For decades it remained a private home; later, it fell into neglect, until a major rehabilitation restored it, also incorporating the former stables and a new underground structure. Since 2016, it has housed the Municipal Historical Archive and the Municipal Bookshop, becoming not just a recovered building but a true centre of local memory. That transformation is what strikes most deeply: a house once meant to express social standing now preserves documents, stories and traces of centuries of municipal life, as if the architecture had found a second vocation in time itself.

Museum • Cascais, Lisboa

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.

Museum • Entroncamento, Santarém

At the Entroncamento Railway Complex, the National Railway Museum tells more than 160 years of railway history in Portugal. Its headquarters are in Entroncamento, but the museum has a national scope and includes centres in several parts of the country. The collection brings together around 36,000 objects, from rolling stock, such as locomotives, carriages and wagons, to track, workshop, signalling, station, ticketing, safety, catering, health and documentary material. The route occupies historic buildings linked to the former railway complex, now transformed into exhibition spaces. Among its most evocative pieces are the Royal Train, the Presidential Train, the Steam Workshops and the Locomotive Roundhouse. Created in 2005, the Fundação Museu Nacional Ferroviário Armando Ginestal Machado safeguards this technical and social heritage, where machines, objects and memories show how the train transformed territories, work and everyday life.

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 • Elvas, Portalegre

In Elvas, the Military Museum occupies the former premises of Infantry Regiment No. 8, in the Quartéis do Casarão and the São Domingos Barracks, a space made available by the Army restructuring completed in 2006. Its mission and staff structure were approved in 2007, the museological project in 2008, and the official inauguration took place on 29 October 2009. The building also preserves an earlier memory: it includes the Convent of São Domingos, the Fernandine Wall and part of the 17th-century wall, elements linked to the fortified system of Elvas, inscribed by UNESCO in 2012. The collections give form to the material history of the Portuguese Army, with sections dedicated to the Health Service, vehicles, horse-drawn equipment, harnesses, transmissions, heavy weapons and the Portuguese Colonial War. Since 2014, the museum has been part of the Portuguese Museum Network, strengthening its role as a place for preserving and studying military culture.

Museum • Mafra, Lisboa

In Sobreiro, between Mafra and Ericeira, the José Franco Museum-Village recreates, in clay, stone and memory, the rural saloio life of former times. Also known as the José Franco Typical Village or Saloia Village, it was born from the dream of the potter and sculptor José Franco, who in the early 1960s wanted to turn his childhood memories into a space of ethnographic character. The village combines replicas of old workshops, shops and furnished houses with real objects, evoking the customs and work of the Mafra region. A windmill, watermill, blacksmith, threshing floor, tavern and carpentry workshop help identify trades that gradually disappeared. Beside this life-size world, miniatures appear, inhabited by small figures, with scenes of fields, schools, chapels, grocery shops and even a recreation of fishing Ericeira. The whole preserves, with artisanal simplicity, a collective memory shaped by the hands of a popular artist.

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.

Science Centre • Lagos, Faro

In the centre of Lagos, overlooking Avenida dos Descobrimentos, the Centro Ciência Viva de Lagos brings science close to the city’s maritime history. Housed in Casa Fogaça, an 18th-century manor house, it combines the memory of the building with a contemporary visual language, marked on the façades by cubes and illusion discs. The permanent exhibition, “From the Astrolabe to GPS”, links the great ocean voyages to the science of navigation, exploring themes such as cartography, shipbuilding and astronomy in the 15th and 16th centuries. In addition to its indoor galleries, the centre has almost 2,000 square metres of outdoor spaces dedicated to science, including the Lighthouse Garden and the Discoveries Garden, both facing the bay of Lagos. Among instruments, experiments and interactive modules, this is a place where the past of voyages becomes questioning, observation and discovery.

Museum • Silves, Faro

In the historic centre of Silves, the Municipal Archaeology Museum organises the city’s memory around an exceptional feature: the Arab Well-Cistern, classified as a National Monument. Identified in late 1979, this Almohad well-cistern, built between the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, was integrated into the museum route, inaugurated in 1990. Its circular structure descends more than eighteen metres and is accompanied by a spiral staircase, with windows opened at different heights to provide access to the water. The building also incorporates, on its southern elevation, a section of the Almedina wall, from the 12th century. The exhibition traces the history of the Silves territory from prehistory to the 18th century, with particular emphasis on Islamic materials collected during decades of excavations in the city. Here, archaeology and architecture make Silves’ long continuity visible.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

Housed on the ground floor of the Carmo Barracks, in Lisbon, the Museum of the Guarda Nacional Republicana occupies a place where institutional history intersects with the country’s political history. The barracks correspond to the former Carmo Convent, completed in 1423, and have been the headquarters of the military guard forces since 1845. It was also in this building that, on 25 April 1974, the transfer of power from Marcelo Caetano to General António de Spínola was completed. Prepared from 2005 onwards, the museum had its first section inaugurated in 2014 and opened regularly to the public in 2015. The exhibition follows a chronological route: it begins with D. Nuno Álvares Pereira and Carmo, moves through the former police guards and reaches the creation of the GNR, decreed in 1911. Objects, documents, uniforms and the recreation of a rural station show how security, memory and public service are inscribed in Portuguese everyday life.

Museum • Faro, Faro

In Faro’s Vila-Adentro, the Museu Municipal de Faro occupies the former Convent of Nossa Senhora da Assunção, classified as a National Monument. The convent was founded by D. Leonor, wife of King João II, and construction began in 1519, continuing until the cloister was completed in 1550. After the extinction of the religious orders, the building had several uses and even housed a cork factory. In 1960, the Municipal Council acquired it to install the Museu Arqueológico e Lapidar Infante D. Henrique, which had operated in the Town Hall since 1894. Today, the quadrangular cloister, with its boxwood garden, organises a route between convent architecture and urban memory. The collection highlights archaeological materials from prehistory to the Roman and medieval periods, including the Ocean Mosaic, from the 2nd/3rd centuries, busts of Hadrian and Agrippina, inscriptions from Ossonoba, Islamic art and painting from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Science Centre • Faro, Faro

Next to Faro Marina, the Centro Ciência Viva do Algarve turns the closeness of the Ria Formosa into a starting point for scientific discovery. Housed in a century-old building originally built to accommodate the Algarve’s first power station, it opened on 3 August 1997 as the first interactive centre in the National Network of Ciência Viva Centres. Its main exhibition is dedicated to the sea, with aquariums and modules that bring natural, environmental and physical-chemical phenomena close to the regional reality. The Apalpário, a tank dedicated to species typical of the Algarve coast and the Ria Formosa, allows close observation of organisms from the intertidal zone, with support from monitors. The centre also includes spaces on light, the brain and the senses, a garden with energy modules, a technological greenhouse and a rooftop terrace facing the Ria Formosa, used for observing wading birds.

Museum Ship • Almada, Setúbal

In Cacilhas, in the municipality of Almada, the Barracuda Submarine returned to public contact as a museum ship of the Portuguese Navy. Inaugurated in this new role on 9 May 2024 and open to visitors since 11 May, it forms part of the Cacilhas dry dock, alongside the Frigate D. Fernando II e Glória. Built in France, it was the second of four Albacora-class submarines in the Portuguese Navy. It entered service on 4 May 1968 and completed its last mission in 2010, after 42 years of operational life. With a length of 54 metres, a submerged displacement of 1,038 tonnes and a crew of 54 servicemen, it could operate down to 300 metres and carry 12 torpedoes. Over its career, it carried out national and international missions and covered 263,358 nautical miles. Today, the dark hull and compact interior reveal the technical precision and discipline required by submarine navigation.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Museu Banksy in Lisbon presents an immersive reading of Banksy’s work through more than 100 reproductions, arranged as video installations, graffiti, canvases, projections and murals. It is not a museum authorised by the artist: the exhibition itself states that it was organised without his involvement, a detail consistent with Banksy’s critical relationship with authorship, the market and institutions. The route brings together works associated with different geographies, from the United Kingdom to France, from the United States to Palestine/Israel and Ukraine, creating a kind of visual map of the political and social issues that run through his work. Instead of presenting originals, the space focuses on scale, staging and the contextualisation of the images, bringing the public closer to a language born in the street and marked by satire, denunciation and contrast. In Lisbon, the Museu Banksy acts as an entry point into an artistic universe that is recognisable, provocative and deliberately uncomfortable.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva Foundation occupies the Azurara Palace, in Largo das Portas do Sol, Lisbon. Created in 1953 by the banker and collector Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva, it began as a Museum-School of Decorative Arts, based on the donation of the palace and a collection assembled by its founder. The building, classified as a Property of Public Interest, is a palace with a 17th-century character and was once home to noble families, having belonged to the Viscount of Azurara in the late 18th century. Inside, the Museum of Portuguese Decorative Arts guides visitors through decorative arts from the 15th to the 18th century, with sections devoted to furniture, textiles, silverware, Chinese porcelain, Portuguese faience, tiles, painting, sculpture and bookbinding. The foundation also maintains arts and crafts workshops, training, and conservation and restoration, preserving traditional techniques through transmission between masters, trainers and apprentices.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Museu de Lisboa - Santo António stands in the historic centre, beside the church dedicated to the saint and close to the Cathedral. It is one of the five sites of the Museu de Lisboa and focuses on Saint Anthony, who was born in the city and lived here until the age of 20. The exhibition presents his relationship with Lisbon through iconography, devotion, popular traditions and the festivities that grew around him. Along the route, it becomes clear how the saint’s image was built over the centuries: the Franciscan preacher, the miracle-worker, the familiar presence in domestic devotions and in the celebrations of June. The museum includes a long-term exhibition area and a documentation centre. Small in scale, but dense in meaning, it brings together religious history, urban memory and popular culture around one of the most present figures in Lisbon’s imagination.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Museu Benfica - Cosme Damião stands beside Estádio da Luz, in Lisbon, and turns the history of Sport Lisboa e Benfica into a large-scale museum route. Inaugurated in 2013, it was named after Cosme Damião, a central figure in the club’s history and often presented as its “father”. The exhibition links Benfica memory with the history of Lisbon, Portugal and the world, creating a broader setting for trophies, names, facts and images. With around 4,000 square metres, spread over three floors, the museum is organised into 29 thematic areas and uses interactivity and technology as an essential part of the visit. Around a thousand pieces from the club’s collection are on display. More than a gallery of victories, the museum shows how sport, collective identity and urban memory can meet in the same space.

Museum • Palmela, Setúbal

The Museu da Música Mecânica is located in Arraiados, in the parish of Pinhal Novo, municipality of Palmela. Inaugurated in 2016, it is a private museum created from the collection assembled by Luís Cangueiro, dedicated to instruments capable of producing sound through exclusively mechanical systems. The collection brings together more than 600 pieces, all in working order, dating from the late 18th century to the first half of the 20th century. Music boxes, gramophones, mechanical organs, phonographs and other devices reveal a history in which music is linked to engineering, entertainment and sound memory. The building, designed by the architect Miguel Marcelino, was conceived as a large closed box, with a concavity at the entrance that evokes the horns of phonographs and gramophones. The five exhibition galleries are arranged around a central courtyard, turning the visit into a listening experience of the past in motion.

Museum • Sintra, Lisboa

The Museu de História Natural de Sintra is located on Rua do Paço, in the Historic Centre of Sintra’s Old Town, in a building dating from 1893. Inaugurated on 1 August 2009, it grew out of the collection assembled over around 50 years by Miguel Barbosa and his wife, Fernanda Barbosa, later donated to the Municipality of Sintra. The long-term exhibition follows the formation of the Earth and the evolution of life, from the Precambrian to the Quaternary, through the municipal collections of palaeontology, mineralogy, malacology and petrography. Among fossils, minerals, shells, rocks and meteorites, the museum displays pieces from different continents. One of its most relevant elements is the type specimen of a pterosaur whose scientific name honours Miguel Barbosa. Small in urban scale, the museum opens in Sintra an unexpected window onto the deep history of the planet.

Museum • Sintra, Lisboa

The Museu da Água e Resíduos, in Ribeira de Sintra, is managed by SMAS de Sintra and is dedicated to environmental education and awareness. Installed in the former tram garage, it occupies a building linked to the history of the line that connected Sintra to Colares and Praia das Maçãs. Its technical memory remains visible: essential parts of the structure have been integrated into interactive modules, such as the original pulley system, once used to lift coal wagons and heavy materials. The route combines indoor and outdoor areas, bringing themes such as the urban water cycle, recycling, waste and sustainability closer through games, models and tactile experiences. Among the most expressive elements are the interactive model of the urban water cycle, the modules on waste separation and the outdoor tank reused for water-related experiments. The museum turns infrastructure and pedagogy into a practical reading of environmental heritage.

Museum • Porto, Porto

The Museu FC Porto is located in Estádio do Dragão, in the eastern area of the city of Porto. Inaugurated on 28 September 2013, on the day when Futebol Clube do Porto marked 120 years, it occupies around 7,000 square metres dedicated to the history and heritage of the club. The permanent exhibition is spread across 27 thematic areas, where trophies, documents, images, objects and interactive resources build a narrative that brings together football, other sports, institutional memory and the life of the city. Among the most visible pieces is Valquíria Dragão, a work by Joana Vasconcelos installed in the reception area. The museum also presents temporary exhibitions, an educational service and spaces supporting its cultural programme. More than a celebration of sporting results, it offers an organised reading of collective identity, made of victories, symbols, protagonists and belonging.

Museum • Porto, Porto

The Museu da Misericórdia do Porto, or MMIPO, is located on Rua das Flores, in Porto’s Historic Centre, in the building that served as the headquarters of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Porto from the mid-16th century until 2013. The institution, founded in 1499, is linked to a long history of assistance, charity and artistic heritage. The museum presents this memory through collections of painting, sculpture, sacred art and objects related to the work of the Misericórdia. The route includes the Igreja da Misericórdia, a 16th-century construction deeply transformed in the 18th century by Nicolau Nasoni, and the Galeria dos Benfeitores, marked by iron-and-glass architecture. Among the works on display, Fons Vitae stands out, an oil painting on oak panel, attributed to Colijn de Coter and dated to around 1515-1517. Between devotion, assistance and art, the museum makes visible a long-standing institutional memory in Porto.

Museum • Porto, Porto

World of Discoveries is located in Porto’s riverside area, a few metres from the Douro and the Alfândega. Inaugurated in 2014, it presents itself as an interactive museum and theme park dedicated to the Portuguese Discoveries. The route combines exhibition, scenography and immersive experience to recreate episodes of Portuguese navigation, maritime routes and encounters with other territories. Among the proposed moments are the Conquest of Ceuta, the figure of Adamastor, the exploration of the inside of a vessel and the evocation of spices. One of its distinctive components is the journey along a water channel, designed to follow, in a staged setting, routes associated with Portuguese maritime expansion. With multilingual content, audio guides and an educational service, the space brings history, adventure and pedagogy together in an accessible format. More than presenting old objects, it seeks to transform the narrative of the Discoveries into a visual, sound and participatory experience.

Museum • Porto, Porto

The Museu dos Transportes e Comunicações occupies the Alfândega Nova do Porto, on Rua Nova da Alfândega, beside the right bank of the Douro. The building, designed by the French architect Jean F. G. Colson, began to be built in 1859 on the former Praia de Miragaia and was inaugurated in 1869. Its neoclassical architecture, marked by the combined use of iron, stone, brick and wood, served the city’s customs activity for more than a century. In 1987 it was decided that it would house the future museum, and the requalification was guided by Eduardo Souto de Moura. Today, the museum preserves the memory of the Customs House and interprets the role of transport and communications in modern society. Among its sections are Metamorfose de um Lugar, O Motor da República and the panel Ribeira Negra, by Júlio Resende.

Cultural Centre • Porto, Porto

The Serralves Foundation, in Porto, brings together contemporary art, architecture, cinema and landscape in a heritage ensemble classified as a National Monument in 2012. The property was acquired by the State in December 1986, and the House and Park opened to the public on 29 May 1987. Created in 1989, the Foundation gave institutional structure to this cultural project. The Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Álvaro Siza, began in 1991 and opened its new building in 1999. The Serralves House preserves the Art Deco language of the 1930s, while the Park, designed by Jacques Gréber, extends over 18 hectares of formal gardens, woodland and a traditional farm. Between lioz-stone interiors, exhibition spaces and tree-lined paths, Serralves shows how historic heritage and contemporary creation can inhabit the same place.

Museum • Porto, Porto

The Natural History and Science Museum of the University of Porto, brings together the University’s scientific memory and brings it closer to the public through a multipolar structure. Formally created at the end of 2015, it resulted from the merger of the Natural History Museum of the University of Porto with the Science Museum of the University of Porto / Faculty of Sciences Centre. Its Central Hub occupies the Historic Building of the Rectorate, next to the Jardim da Cordoaria, and houses collections of geology, palaeontology, zoology, archaeology and ethnography, scientific instruments, documentary and audiovisual archives, and the Herbarium of the University of Porto. The museum also includes the Biodiversity Gallery – Ciência Viva Centre and the Botanical Garden of Porto. Its collections comprise around 850,000 specimens, distributed across 17 collections, with material dating from the mid-19th century to the present day.

Museum • Porto, Porto

The Museu do Carro Eléctrico, in Porto, occupies part of the former Massarelos Thermoelectric Power Station and preserves the memory of the city’s urban rail transport. The idea of creating a museum emerged in the 1980s, when the electric traction network was losing ground to buses and the car. On 18 May 1992, it opened to the public with vehicles restored by STCP. The building, completed in 1911 and fully operational from 1915, produced and transformed energy to power the trams. Inspired by French industrial structures, it had two production naves and a chimney connected to coal combustion. Today, the collection brings together 28 vehicles, technical equipment, uniforms, transport tickets and documentation. Among rails, machines and restored bodies, the museum tells a story in which energy, city and mobility move forward side by side.

Science Centre • Aveiro, Aveiro

Fábrica — Centro Ciência Viva de Aveiro, in Aveiro, occupies the building of the former Companhia Aveirense de Moagens and transforms an industrial space into a place dedicated to scientific culture. Opened to the public in 2004, it results from a partnership between the University of Aveiro and Ciência Viva, bringing research, schools and the community closer together. The name “Fábrica” preserves the memory of the building, but also expresses its current function: producing curiosity, experiments and questions. The interactive exhibitions explore themes such as science in the kitchen, robotics and holography, with modules designed to be touched, tested and observed. Its activity also extends beyond the building, through educational programmes and collaborations with scientific institutions, companies, municipalities and teaching bodies. Between imagined machinery and science in action, the former mill has become a public workshop of knowledge.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Roman Galleries of Rua da Prata lie hidden beneath Lisbon’s Baixa, between Rua da Prata and Rua da Conceição, as one of the most discreet traces of ancient Olisipo. Dating from the 1st century AD, they are now interpreted as a cryptoporticus: a vaulted stone structure created to form a stable platform on which large buildings could stand. Their presence was identified in 1771, during the Pombaline reconstruction that followed the 1755 earthquake. Flooded by underground water, the galleries maintain a physical relationship with the damp ground of the riverside city. Inside, corridors, vaults and masonry walls reveal the technical scale of Roman construction. Beneath the regular grid of modern Lisbon, this space preserves an ancient, silent and essential layer of the city.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The 3D Fun Art Museum in Lisbon offers a light and participatory way of looking at images. The space brings together around 40 scenarios with 3D images and optical illusions, combining the science of visual perception with the play of illusion. Here, the artwork does not remain only in front of those who observe it: it asks for presence, movement and framing. The compositions are designed to integrate the body into the scene and turn photography into an essential part of the experience. Between trick-art paintings, illusion rooms and games of scale, unexpected situations appear, such as entering Van Gogh’s world, taking part in a safari or living alongside a dinosaur. The result is a contemporary and accessible museum, where perspective, depth and imagination meet in a sequence of images built in the moment.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

MUDE — Design Museum, in Lisbon, occupies a building that preserves the memory of the former headquarters of Banco Nacional Ultramarino. Today, that financial past coexists with a museum dedicated to the many expressions of design. The building itself is treated as a living archive: its movable and integrated heritage forms part of the collection, and its architectural evolution is understood as material to be read. The collection brings together documentary and museum inventory entries organised into areas such as graphic design, fashion, contemporary jewellery, product, editorial and stage design. The long-term exhibition “What are things for? Pieces from the MUDE Collection 1900-2020” proposes looking at design not only as form, but as process, use, communication and consumption. Between the display depot, specialised library and exhibition spaces, MUDE shows how objects also tell the history of ideas.

Museum • Sintra, Lisboa

The Sintra Myths and Legends Interactive Centre, in Sintra, presents the town’s imaginative dimension through an immersive language. Opened in 2015, it proposes a journey through time and space, where myths and legends are historically framed and placed in dialogue with music, literature and local memory. The route is spread across 17 spaces and crosses reality and fiction through set design, multimedia and sensory experiences. Technology appears as a narrative medium: there are touchscreens, video mapping, augmented reality, 3D films, sensory effects and holograms. Among the stories evoked are the Creation of the Crags, the Tomb of the Two Brothers and the Seven Sighs. The centre reveals a Sintra made not only of palaces and landscape, but also of narratives transmitted, reinvented and staged to show the cultural force of its imagination.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

MACAM — Armando Martins Contemporary Art Museum, in Lisbon, makes public the private collection assembled by Armando Martins over five decades. Opened to the public on 22 March 2025, it occupies the former Palace of the Counts of Vila Franca, later Counts of Ribeira Grande, a building with origins in the early 18th century. The history of the site remains legible in the long façade, the former chapel, the noble staircase and the traces recovered during the rehabilitation. The collection, begun in 1974, brings together more than 600 works, from the late 19th century to the present day, spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and installation. The route places modern Portuguese art in dialogue with national and international contemporary creation. Between palace, museum and hotel, MACAM presents the private collection as public matter, open to observation and conversation.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Health Museum, in Lisbon, belongs to the National Institute of Health Doutor Ricardo Jorge and gives museological form to the memory of health in Portugal. Created by the Ministry of Health in 2007, it has been presented since April 2017 in the former Neurosurgery Service of Santo António dos Capuchos Hospital, with the exhibition “800 Years of Health in Portugal”. The route follows the history of health from the foundation of the nation to the creation of the National Health Service, bringing together around 400 pieces from its collections and from partner institutions. The narrative moves through the first medieval services, royal hospitals, pharmacopoeia, health policies, technical and scientific innovations and the fight against endemic diseases. The museum also preserves collections linked to tuberculosis, malaria, urology, psychology and anaesthesia, showing how science, care and heritage intersect in collective life.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

Casa Fernando Pessoa, in Lisbon, occupies the writer’s last home, where he lived with his family from 1920 until a few days before his death on 30 November 1935. The building was acquired by Lisbon City Council in the late 1980s, when it was in poor condition, and opened to the public on 30 November 1993. Rebuilt while preserving original elements, the House keeps personal objects, some furniture and a large part of the books that belonged to Pessoa. The long-term exhibition is organised around memory, literary creation, reading and home. Across three floors, it presents the heteronyms, documents, works of art and the Private Library, classified as a National Treasure. More than preserving a reconstructed bedroom, the House shows how reading nourished one of the most plural literary works of the 20th century.

Museum • Sesimbra, Setúbal

The Maritime Museum of Sesimbra, housed in the Fortress of Santiago, presents the town’s long relationship with the sea and fishing. Opened to the public in 2016, it forms part of the Municipal Museum of Sesimbra and organises its route through several spaces within the fortress. The exhibition brings together material heritage and memories collected with the fishing community, giving voice to the knowledge of seafarers. Among the oldest objects are an anchor stock around five thousand years old, and hooks and net weights dated between 2500 and 200 BC. The route addresses fishermen’s journeys, routes, fishing grounds, fishing techniques, boatbuilding, maritime devotions, the Professor Luiz Saldanha Marine Park and the relationship of King Carlos with Sesimbra. With models, films, documents and interactive technology, the museum turns local history into a narrative of work, identity and continuity.

Museum • Lisboa, Lisboa

The Museu do Lactário, in Lisbon, preserves the memory of the first milk dispensary created in Portugal. Established in 2019 by the Fundação Aboim Sande Lemos, it tells the story of a social work begun in 1901 with the Associação Protectora da Primeira Infância. The Lactário began operating in 1903, supporting disadvantaged children from Alfama and their families. The help was daily and free: controlled-quality cow’s milk, paediatric care, hygienic, social and neonatal support. The museum brings together objects, documents, photographs, painting, sculpture, tilework and scientific and technical pieces linked to that activity. Among the most expressive items are four incubators for premature babies, acquired in 1903, Alexandre Lion models. By reconstructing services such as Lacticology, the Lactário, the Medical Service and the Social Service, the museum reveals a discreet history of care, science and child protection.