Top 10 Museums in Portugal
Pinning a national museum ranking to ten institutions is always partly arbitrary, but the ten below would feature on most informed lists of the country's most important museums. They cover the breadth of period, medium, and curatorial approach that distinguishes the leading museum nations.
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon
The Gulbenkian holds Calouste Gulbenkian's personal collection — Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Islamic, East Asian, and European art including Rembrandt, Rubens, and an exceptional Lalique gallery. The 1969 modernist building sits in its own garden.
MAAT, Lisbon
The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology on the Tagus riverfront, opened 2016 (Amanda Levete), holds Iberian contemporary art and architectural exhibitions. The undulating tiled roof is walkable.
National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon
The MNAA in a sixteenth-century palace at Santos holds Portugal's finest pre-1850 art: the Saint Vincent Panels by Nuno Gonçalves (c.1470), Hieronymus Bosch's Temptation of St Anthony, and major Namban screens from the Portuguese trade with Japan.
National Tile Museum, Lisbon
The Museu Nacional do Azulejo in a former convent traces five centuries of Portuguese ceramic tile, from sixteenth-century geometric panels to contemporary commissions. The 36-metre Great Panorama of Lisbon (1700) survived the 1755 earthquake.
Berardo Collection / MAC-CCB, Lisbon
The Centro Cultural de Belém holds the Berardo collection of modern and contemporary art, recently restructured as the MAC. Particular strength in Pop Art, Conceptual, and post-war European painting.
Soares dos Reis National Museum, Porto
Portugal's first national museum, in the Carrancas Palace in Porto, holds Portuguese painting, sculpture, glass, and decorative arts from the nineteenth century centred on the sculptor Soares dos Reis.
Serralves, Porto
Álvaro Siza's 1999 building in a thirty-acre park holds the Serralves Foundation's contemporary art collection. The adjacent Art Deco Serralves Villa is part of the campus.
Coach Museum, Lisbon
The Museu Nacional dos Coches in Belém holds one of the world's finest historic carriage collections, including the 1716 papal coach commissioned for the embassy of John V to Pope Clement XI.
Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisbon
An exceptional house-museum on Rua Rosa Araújo with collector António de Medeiros e Almeida's clocks, silver, paintings, and Chinese export porcelain in original domestic settings.
Museum of Sacred Art, Évora
The cathedral museum in Évora holds Portuguese Manueline-period sacred art, with the cathedral's own treasures and an outstanding silver collection.
These ten do not exhaust the country's museum landscape — every list of this kind makes painful omissions — but they offer a credible foundation for a serious museum trip.
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