Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian)

The Gulbenkian collection, from ancient Egypt to Lalique

Calouste Gulbenkian bought around six thousand works of art in his lifetime, and about a thousand are on show. They’re grouped by origin: the ancient world and the East first, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Armenia, China and Japan, then Europe and the Lalique room.

The ancient and Islamic galleries

In the Mesopotamia gallery, a stone relief from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal now stands at the centre. Restorers took off old layers of wax, and the carved alabaster reads clearly again.

Coins and medals have a new room, in a space that had never been open to the public. Look there for the coin with a four-horse chariot that inspired the Gulbenkian Foundation’s logo.

The mosque lamps of the 13th and 14th centuries spent more than twenty years displayed together. Now each has a restored case of its own, with anti-glare glass, and filters have replaced the blinds, so the room looks out on the inner garden.

In its report on the reopening, RTP, Portugal’s public broadcaster, called the lamps one of the rarest collections in the world.

Elsewhere, the museum’s largest gallery holds ceramics and carpets from Persia, India and the Caucasus. There are illuminated Armenian manuscripts too, and porcelain, lacquer and prints from China and Japan.

Houdon’s Diana, Manet and the Gulbenkian Lalique room

Past the Chinese and Japanese rooms, a wood-and-metal screen gives you a first glimpse of Rembrandt and Rubens. Beyond it, the European paintings run on to Turner, Degas, Renoir and Monet.

Manet’s Soap Bubbles is here because Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery in London, advised Gulbenkian to buy it in 1943.

Among the sculptures stands Diana, a nude marble goddess over two metres tall, made in 1780 by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Catherine the Great of Russia bought her in 1784. Gulbenkian got her from the Hermitage in 1930, when the Soviet state was selling off the museum’s art.

The Lalique room holds almost two hundred pieces that Gulbenkian bought from the French jeweller René Lalique himself, between 1899 and 1927. “I am proud to have in my possession what I believe to be the largest existing set of his works,” he wrote to Lalique’s daughter in 1945.

The Gulbenkian garden and the Modern Art Centre (CAM)

Outside, the Museum stands at the north end of a park that anyone can walk into for free, from sunrise to sunset. At the south end is the Modern Art Centre, the CAM, in a building of its own.

The garden

The landscape architects Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and António Viana Barreto laid it out in the 1960s, with lawns, lakes and an open-air amphitheatre. It was a park long before that, and from the 1880s, the Foundation records, Lisbon’s zoo spent ten years here.

In 2024 the garden grew to the south. The Foundation had bought two neighbouring hectares back in 2005, and the Lebanese landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic turned more than 7,500 square metres of them into a new garden around the CAM. It came with a new entrance, on Rua Marquês de Fronteira.

The CAM, remade by Kengo Kuma

The Japanese architect Kengo Kuma remade the 1983 building by the British architect Leslie Martin and opened it up to the garden. Its new landmark is the Engawa, a canopy 100 metres long covered in 3,274 white ceramic tiles, named after the veranda that runs along a traditional Japanese house.

The CAM reopened in September 2024, after four years of works, with about a thousand square metres of new exhibition space underground. Its collection of modern and contemporary Portuguese art runs to about 12,000 works.

So this is where the Portuguese art is. The Museum has none of its own, and its director points visitors instead to an Indian carpet with 17th-century Portuguese navigators on it.

Calouste Gulbenkian Museum tickets, free Sundays and hours

One ticket now covers both collections: the Museum ticket, €16, includes the CAM collection. The CAM alone is €10, and the All Inclusive, at €18, adds the temporary exhibitions. You can buy at the Museum and CAM ticket desks, and the Gulbenkian doesn’t mention timed entry.

Nobody pays on Sundays from 14:00, and under-18s go in free on any day. Under-30s get 25% off, and over-65s 10%.

The Lisboa Card takes 20% off both the Museum and the CAM, and the Gulbenkian lists the discount too. As everywhere the card gives a discount, you show it at the ticket desk.

On the Museum ticket that’s €3.20 off. A one-day Lisboa Card, at €31, also covers the metro here, so it’s best on a day you pair the Gulbenkian with sights the card includes.

Coats and bags go in free cloakrooms and lockers, on the Museum’s lower floor and on the CAM’s floor C1. Lifts and ramps reach every space and part of the garden. For a guide, there’s the free Bloomberg Connects app, with free wifi throughout.

For lunch, the Museum has a cafeteria on its lower floor and the CAM has A Mesa do CAM, both open with the galleries and closed on Tuesdays. A kiosk in the south garden, by the Engawa, opens daily from 9:30 to 17:30.

Coming up in the Museum, A Coleção Imaginária (The Imaginary Collection) runs from 21 November 2026 to 15 March 2027. The artist Teresa Pavão sets her work, mostly ceramics, beside pieces from the collection, along the Museum’s route and in its two inner gardens. The Gulbenkian doesn’t say whether it needs a separate ticket.

Mr Five Per Cent: the story of Calouste Gulbenkian

Gulbenkian’s fortune came from oil, and so did his nickname. In 1914 he cut his share of the Turkish Petroleum Company from 15% to 5%, to keep the Anglo-Persian company, today’s BP, on side, and Mr Five Per Cent stuck.

He was born in Istanbul in 1869, to a family of Armenian origin, and became a British citizen in 1902. In 1942, during the Second World War, he chose Portugal over Switzerland and moved to Lisbon, where he died in 1955.

He bought art by one rule: “only the best is good enough for me”. The collection might have stayed abroad. His Egyptian pieces and his paintings had spent years at the British Museum and the National Gallery in London, and then in Washington.

His will of 1953 left it all to a foundation in Lisbon. The last pieces arrived in 1960, the museum opened in 1969, and after a renovation it reopened on 18 July 2026, as the Foundation turned 70.

On the metro from the Gulbenkian

The Gulbenkian lies between two metro stations, São Sebastião and Praça de Espanha, five and six stops from Baixa-Chiado on the blue line. Carris buses 716, 726 and 756 stop on Avenida de Berna. Between them, the two stations reach the zoo, the Benfica stadium and the Oceanarium with no change.