Museu de Marinha

The Museu de Marinha occupies a wing of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, one of Lisbon's most celebrated examples of Manueline architecture. Founded in 1863 by King Luís I, the museum traces Portugal's extraordinary maritime history, from the Age of Discovery through to the twentieth century. Its collections include navigational instruments, royal barges, model ships, and the seaplane that completed the first crossing of the South Atlantic in 1922. The sheer breadth of the artefacts reflects the central role that seafaring played in shaping Portugal as a nation and connecting it to the wider world.

Visitors to the Jerónimos Monastery can combine a skip-the-line guided tour of that magnificent UNESCO-listed building with time in the museum's galleries, gaining a fuller picture of the ambitions and achievements that the monastery was built to commemorate. The monastery itself was commissioned by King Manuel I in the early sixteenth century and stands as one of the finest surviving monuments to the era of Portuguese exploration.