Theatre and Dance Museum
In the Palácio do Monteiro-Mor, over 300,000 items from the performing arts; closed for refurbishment works.
National Museum of Theatre and Dance – Palácio do Monteiro-Mor
The National Museum of Theatre and Dance holds the largest collection relating to the performing arts in Portugal. The idea of a theatre museum, attempted since the early twentieth century, only took shape in 1979 with a major exhibition devoted to the Rosas & Brasão Company (1880–1898), after which the collections began to be assembled, almost all of them from donations. Officially created in 1982, the museum was inaugurated on 4 February 1985 in the former Palácio do Monteiro-Mor, an eighteenth-century building in Lumiar restored and adapted for the purpose; in 2015 it adopted the name National Museum of Theatre and Dance. The collections number more than 300,000 items – costume designs and stage costumes, set drawings and models, props, posters and programmes, records and scores, paintings, sculptures, caricatures and some 120,000 photographs. The documentation centre and library hold around 40,000 titles, together with press cuttings, sound recordings and archival collections of people and institutions central to the country's artistic life. Over the years the museum has presented temporary exhibitions on theatre companies and figures from the world of performance. Under the management of Museus e Monumentos de Portugal, it is closed to the public for refurbishment works funded by the Recovery and Resilience Plan, with no reopening date announced.
Located at: Museus e Monumentos de Portugal
Address: Estrada do Lumiar, 10, 1600-495 Lisboa
Opening hours: Closed to the public for refurbishment works (Recovery and Resilience Plan); no reopening date announced
Phone: +351 913 556 113
Coordinates: 38.774588, -9.166714
Buses: 703, 768, 796, 736, 41B
Metro: Lumiar (Yellow), Ameixoeira (Yellow)
Opened: 1985 (41 years)
