Museu de Marinha

Really enjoyed the Maritime Museum — a great place to explore Portugal’s deep connection to the sea. The exhibits are well organized, with beautiful ship models, navigation instruments, and artifacts from the Age of Discoveries. The highlight is the large hall with full-size royal barges and historic boats — truly impressive and worth the visit on its own. The museum is spacious, calm, and easy to walk through. It’s a perfect stop if you’re already visiting the Jerónimos Monastery next door. A great mix of history, culture, and impressive craftsmanship. Highly recommended for both adults and kids.

Great museum with an excellent exhibition on the history of Portuguese seafaring. Very engaging, full of interesting details and curiosities, and just the right duration for a visit. Inspiring and well worth seeing.

Very nice museum to learn about the rich naval history of Portugal. It’s very well maintained, and the exhibits are explained in both Portuguese and English. We loved it, including my 11-year-old. What surprised us even more was that the entrance was free, maybe it was just that day, I’m not sure. Another great thing is that it’s not overcrowded like most other Lisbon attractions. It’s a must-visit, unless you really don’t like museums.

Lovely exhibition! Would have loved even more from the age of discovery, but what was, was nice, and all the ship models were awesome. Price is very reasonable.

Nice museum to see nautical history, technology, history of fishing vessels of the area, exploration and spice trade. Plenty of models of ships to understand variations in designs and purpose.

The museum is nice, but it intentionally don’t really tackle the big questions or offer knowledge on shipbuilding - managing both fresh and saltwater using wood, navigation and many more. It does shows an interesting collection of devices, both replicas, original, shipwreck recovered and models of ships. There is an audio guide and it is decent museum. But as very typical - organized weirdly, too many items, half of them don’t have English explanations. I came in hope to see real discovery era ships (or models of), learn how they were built and what reason was for modifications - the entrance give you a notion this will be address in detail, why it seems shipbuilding degraded over time. (Maybe bigger ships needed power - square sails, and England being the real ruler of sea?) What was the nature of the agreement since 14th century? Why at least according to the book shogun they were enemies regarding Japan? Missionary dark past is portrayed as a foot note or a desire to return to glory (aka childish and not realistic) slavery and local upheaval of the colonies is also portrayed as unjust gorilla war, privateering that probably ended slavery more than morality, glass that interferes with viewing the king and queen cabins and ship models. The gallons room is mainly pleasure boat (small) and fishermen not very old or big. Again missing data way there are so many designs? There is better info when travelling Portugal and seeing those “modern” traditional boats that are still at use. There is also a whaling boat from 1970~ Azores. Although gruesome, would like to know more. I think this is the last European whalers. As not tribes in a very remote European islands, but maybe at that time there was no difference. I don’t know. It feels like it has a lot of potential not being met. Also, it is inside the monastery, but not the big white marble. This is confusing and cost me a lot of time and money and will unfortunately be my remembered experience from Portugal (and not the only such). I do recommend this place, but don’t go out of your way for this.

So informative of Portugal's Maritime history and its very profound impact on discovery of other world regions. Huge display areas and a great cafe - indoors & outdoors!

I have to give you a brief assessment of the museum, because we were very surprised. There was a huge queue for the monestry right next to it, and as there is no shade there, we preferred to enter here. We did well. The building is the same, so the museum space itself is remarkable, but the content is also abundant. We thought we would run through it, but you can easily spend 1.5-2 hours here. Several sections present the country's history from a maritime and nautical perspective, with the exhibition divided into thematic sections. There were more modern parts (the beginning of the exhibition) and a bit more traditional parts, a temporary gallery, and at the end of the tour there was even a huge hall with real ships and planes. It is definitely worth a visit. If you have a Lisbon card, you can get a 20% discount on admission.

We were fortunate to come here as a Gate 1 tour. With tours you can skip the lines, so I like that about them, but of course you are on everyone else's schedule. I was torn between admiration of a culture playing to it's strengths (being surrounded by water has it's perks), and Derek L's view of colonialism. There was exactly 1 acknowledgement of how the country benefitted from slavery. It's a slippery slope of acknowledging how one acquired wealth but also realizing it occurred at a major violation of human rights. The room of boats was awesome, esp being able to view it from above on a balcony. The gift shop had some nice holiday themed items.

The Museu de Marinha (Maritime Museum) was one of the highlights of time in Lisbon. The Portuguese have such a rich maritime history, with all of their exploration, colonization, and conquest. And while the colonization and conquest was not the highlight of their history, it makes for a great museum. They have statues of the explorers, models of hundreds of ships from the early days of exploration through modern ships and warships. At the end of your walk through the museum they have a very large exhibit of royal ships and then sea planes. There is way too much to see in one visit, and I admit, it was tiring when we reached the end. However, it was fascinating.

We did not want to wait in the very very long line for the monastery and saw tis on the end and wandered over and loved it! Very informative, great history, and amazing display. You have several parts, the museum proper with the artifacts, then the area with ships and planes and it is all worth exploring. We spent about an hour total. If you are into naval history, military history, or just a history nerd over all like I am, you will enjoy this museum. I had zero interest in going in and ended up reading everything and learning a lot! The Portuguese were at the forefront of maritime exploration and this is a great display of it. There was a small exhibit to the Portuguese war my father served in and it was great to learn more about it in a fairly neutral display for such a horrific war. They did a good job not glorifying it but presenting it neutrally as opposed to the other displays.

Thanks to a Tauck tour, I had the opportunity to visit the Maritime museum without lines. What a well thought out museum with wonderful exhibits. Our guide from Tauck was also very informative which made the visit much more enjoyable. I suggest a guide for this museum so you can really understand what you are actually viewing. I also enjoyed taking pictures freely in this museum which is not always the case in many other museums. This was my favorite museum in Lisbon. Don't miss it if you are visiting Lisbon for the first time.

Great Portuguese explorers once dominated the oceans of the world and this is a great place to understand the depth of their contributions. The collection of artifacts here are priceless to a military or naval historian. They also have a nice collection of paintings that depict many of the military happenings of this time period. The museum is organized nicely because it is currently run by the Portuguese Navy. This is a must stop for all history buffs.

Jarring layout and basically a tone-deaf monument to the excesses of Portuguese colonialism. I've been to a few national maritime museums (UK Greenwich, Netherlands Amsterdam, Denmark Helsingor) and there's always a level of national bias, which is to be expected. That said, the others made some apology or explained the colonial exploits in a modern lens. The UK Museum of Naval History has a large exhibit on the slave trade and one on the Opium Wars that cast the Empire in harsher light. None of that is to be found at the Portuguese naval museum. All the exhibits cast Portugal in the brightest of lights: "Conquering the Atlantic," glossing over Portugal's decline between the 1600s and 1800s, and most disgustingly, glorification of their Colonial Wars in Angola and the Congo Basin in the 1970s. There's little context given and no narrative as to why the items on display matter. Most exhibits have plain text explaining whatever model of a warship it is, or the fancy medal or portrait. The layout is confusing: the end of the Golden Age of Discovery drops you off in the middle of the 1800s and the Napoleonic Wars, where Portugal played a little brother role to Great Britain. There's no logical flow to the room layout: to exit, you have to backtrack through exhibits you've already seen. The only redeeming aspect that makes this a two-star museum is the renovated Age of Discovery exhibits. It strikes a strong narrative about why Henry the Navigator and future kings desired expanding the kingdom, and is a modern museum on par with other strong museums. It's the first exhibit, and it gives a glimmer of hope that this museum might become better with future renovations.

Very disappointed because I expected it to be much bigger and more interesting for a museum of such a seafaring nation as Portugal

Four stars for the €0 admission and decent collection, although they should have at least one full-sized Portuguese galleon on display to make it really worth your while. The boat display in the separate building was underwhelming.

Wonderfully laid out and spacious museum with interesting and informative displays as well as useful English descriptions of most exhibits. The exhibits include ship replicas, uniforms, navigation equipment, and of course information about the golden age of Portuguese exploration. Sort of off the beaten track (of the more famous church, former monastery, monument of the discoverers, and coach museum) but as interesting as any of those. One room is devoted to exploration, one to fishing, one to modern shipping and military, one to royal yachts, one to royal barges. All in all a fascinating trip down memory lane about Da Gama and Dias with lots of new information