Museu do Chiado (National Museum of Contemporary Art)

Portuguese art at the Museu do Chiado, from Romanticism to now

The collection runs from about 1850 to the present, from Romanticism and naturalism to modernism and recent work, mostly by Portuguese artists.

It goes on show in exhibitions that change, so treat these painters as what the museum owns, with no promise of what’s hanging the week you go. Between shows some rooms can be shut, so check what’s on before you go.

This is the place for Portuguese painting from naturalism to modernism, in rooms visitors describe as spacious and rarely crowded. If you’re after ancient Egypt, old masters and Monet, the Gulbenkian Museum is the one for that.

Naturalism and the painters of the 1890s

Naturalism, the style that painted ordinary people as they were, is where the collection is strongest. Marques de Oliveira’s Waiting for the Boats (1892) is the picture of that world: fishermen’s wives on a beach, watching the sea.

From the same years comes Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, a leading painter of the 1880s who later ran the museum, from 1914 to 1929. His group portrait O Grupo do Leão (1885) belongs to the collection.

Then come the modernists. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, who died young in 1918, is here thanks to a gift from the sculptor Diogo de Macedo, director in the 1940s. Almada Negreiros, poet and painter of the same generation, is in the collection too.

Impressões Digitais and the shows on now

Until 30 December 2026, floors 1 and 2 hold Impressões Digitais (Digital Fingerprints), about 200 works from the collection in every medium from painting and prints to photography, installation and video.

Two temporary shows run alongside it this winter. Délio Jasse, an artist born in Luanda, Angola, shows photographs until 7 February 2027, and Antologias da Memória (Anthologies of Memory), on identity and memory, runs until 31 January 2027.

The vaulted atrium and the sculpture garden

The 1994 rebuild left the convent’s structure on show. You come in under a hexagonal brick vault on two pillars of lioz, Lisbon’s pale limestone, with a walkway hung across the atrium.

At the other end of the visit, the route goes down to a terrace and the sculpture garden, a courtyard of 19th- and 20th-century bronzes.

Opening hours and entry at the Museu do Chiado

Children under 12 go in free, and for everyone else the ticket is part of the Lisboa Card.

Bought by itself, a ticket is €10, so the card won’t pay for itself on this museum alone. A 24-hour Lisboa Card at €31 is the better buy on a day that also takes in the metro, tram 28 and a couple of pricier tickets.

From convent to Museu do Chiado

The building began as the Franciscan monastery of São Francisco da Cidade, badly damaged in the 1755 earthquake. The museum was created there in 1911, when Portugal’s old fine-arts museum was split in two.

When fire swept through the Chiado in 1988, the museum came through unharmed, though the works were taken out as a precaution. The French government then offered a reconstruction by the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, and the museum reopened on 12 July 1994.

How to get to the Museu do Chiado by metro or tram 28

The museum has two street addresses, Rua Serpa Pinto 4 and Rua Capelo 13, and its metro station is Baixa-Chiado. Tram 28 stops on Rua Nova da Trindade and Rua Vítor Cordon, and buses 60, 208 and 758 serve the museum, all on the Lisboa Card.