Quake: Lisbon Earthquake Museum (Museu do Terramoto)

Quake’s ten rooms and the 1755 simulator

A visit takes about an hour and a half, in a group, with a set time in each of the ten rooms. It starts at check-in, where you’re given a wristband, and groups are called in by wristband colour.

The wristband collects content as you go, too, and the museum emails you more afterwards.

Then you step into Lisbon as it was before 1755, a city that has since vanished, rebuilt around you with video mapping and special effects.

The big moment is the 1755 simulator, where the seats shake. From age 6 you can ride; anyone who’d rather not can watch the quake and the light-and-sound show from an area in the same room.

Another room covers other great earthquakes, Tohoku in Japan in 2011 and San Francisco in 1906, with a second simulator for San Francisco. Interactive stations explain how earthquakes and tsunamis start, and what civil protection does about them.

Everything is in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French.

Quake tickets, ages and opening times

The Lisboa Card doesn’t cover Quake: it’s neither among the card’s included sights nor on its discount list. You buy tickets from the museum, online or at reception, and the price moves with the day, the time and the season.

As of October 2026, adults pay €23.50 to €29.50, children aged 6 to 12 €17.50 to €22, and over-65s €20 to €25. Families can also ask for the after-school pack, €16.50 a head for one adult with two or four children.

Children aged 4 and 5 go in free but can’t ride the simulator, and under-4s can’t go in at all.

Visitors rate it highly, 4.7 out of 5 from 1,595 reviews on Tripadvisor in October 2026. What they complain of is the price and the pace: roughly 10 minutes a room, which some found too little to take everything in.

The Lisboa Card, at €31 for 24 hours, still helps with the trip. The train and tram 15E out to Belém are included, and so is the National Coach Museum next door, Portugal’s collection of royal carriages.

The last session is at 18:00, and a visitor who arrived at 17:00 still got the full 90 minutes.

Check the health notes before you book. The whole route is indoors, so the museum doesn’t advise it for people with claustrophobia, and its artificial lights and smells can affect photosensitive epilepsy and breathing problems.

The simulator isn’t advised in pregnancy, or with heart or back problems or reduced mobility. Wheelchair users have to contact the museum before buying, and in the 1755 simulator full access depends on moving onto the shaking seats.

The 1755 earthquake, and how Quake tells it

The museum tells the story like this. The earthquake struck on the morning of All Saints’ Day. Then the sea came in, with waves of about 5 metres reaching roughly where the Rua Augusta arch, on Lisbon’s main square, stands today.

It was a tsunami that crossed the ocean, from a fault about 100 by 50 km. Waves reached 10 to 15 metres at Sagres, over 10 metres at Cádiz and 3 metres as far as the Caribbean.

Fires followed the shaking, from stoves in homes and candles in churches, and looters raiding palaces and churches started some of them. Nobody agrees on how many died: estimates vary widely, and the museum doesn’t give a figure.

Belém had its own luck that morning. King José I and his family survived because they were at the royal palace here, when Belém was still on the edge of the city, a place of palaces and country estates.

Less than three months after the quake, the king’s minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later Marquis of Pombal, sent the bishops a 13-question survey for their parish priests to answer. The museum notes that many see it as the start of modern seismology.

Manuel da Maia, Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel drew the new downtown, with wide straight streets and the gaiola pombalina, a timber frame inside the walls built to ride out quakes. Oral tradition says soldiers marched around it to test it.

The museum points out that Voltaire and the young Kant wrote about the quake. Voltaire’s answer was a poem on the Lisbon disaster, published in 1756, against the optimists who held that all is for the best.

Quake itself, according to the Portuguese magazine NiT, was the project of a couple, Ricardo Clemente and Maria Marques, who spent seven years on it. The science came from the seismologists Susana Custódio and Luís Matias, with the historian André Canhoto Costa.

From Quake to the monastery and the river

Quake is at Rua Cais da Alfândega Velha 39, by the National Coach Museum. Trams 15E and 18E stop at Belém, as does the Cascais-line train, about 8 minutes from Cais do Sodré, and the Lisboa Card is valid on all three.