Museums and Palaces

The basis for the founding of the National Museum of Ethnology was the 1959 collection of pieces carried out by Jorge Dias, in. He was responsible for putting on the exhibition "The Life and Art of the Maconde People" as part of the Studies Mission on the Ethnic Minorities of the Portuguese Territories.

In 1965, the Museum was formally founded under the name of the Museum of Ethnology of the Portuguese Territories. In 1974, it was renamed the Museum of Ethnology and, the following year, it was rehoused in its current purpose-built construction. After difficulties stemming from a lack of funding, it was closed to the public but the research team was kept on. It reopened to the public in 1985 before joining the national museum network in 1989.

In its collection of around 30,000 pieces, the systematic acquisition of agricultural implements has proved particularly noteworthy. As the museum has no permanent display, exhibitions are put on for variable periods of time, covering multiple themes. There have been covering both the kind of fields usual to the anthropological sciences ("people and cultures" etc.) in addition to themes of more direct contemporary relevance or specific contexts such as the Portuguese musical style of fado.