Museu Romântico da Quinta da Macieirinha (Romantic Museum)

Inside the Museu Romântico and its garden

Around the house, the garden runs into a small wood of camellias, with a view down the Douro to the Arrábida bridge, the big concrete arch near the river mouth.

The rooms of the Museu Romântico

From 1972 the house showed the home of a well-off 19th-century family. It reopened in 2017, after work by the architect Camilo Rebelo and the restoration of pieces in the collection.

Four years later it changed course and became the Extensão do Romantismo, or Romanticism Extension, one of the sites of the Museu do Porto, the city museum. Its exhibitions now change from show to show.

The 2022 exhibition, Metamorfoses, brought together pieces shown before in the old Romantic Museum and in other Museu do Porto spaces, with others never exhibited. So what you find inside depends on the current show, which the museum announces on its website.

Museu Romântico tickets, hours and getting there

The garden is free to walk into, and the house costs €4. You pay at the door or online through the museum’s own ticket office, since Tiqets doesn’t sell it and no Porto pass includes it.

Sunday entry may be free. The house was on the list of five city museums open free on Sundays that came with the Porto.CARD, a city card you can no longer buy.

The Museu do Porto’s own price list doesn’t give that rule for its houses, though, so it’s worth asking on a Sunday.

If you’re seeing more of the city museum, its €8 Museu da Cidade ticket lasts seven days, though the museum doesn’t publish which sites it covers.

It’s a short visit, an hour by the tourist office’s count.

City buses 200, 201, 207 and 208 are among the lines that stop nearby, and from the Clérigos Tower it’s about 20 minutes on foot. Drivers can use the Crystal Palace car park, with 490 spaces and open round the clock.

Charles Albert of Sardinia’s last months at the Quinta da Macieirinha

In March 1849 Charles Albert lost the Battle of Novara to the Austrians and abdicated that night. The throne of Piedmont-Sardinia passed to his son, Victor Emmanuel II, who in 1861 became the first king of united Italy.

He signed the formal act in Spain, on his way to Porto, and reached the city on 19 April. In May he moved into this house, then known as the Casa de Entrequintas.

He died here on 28 July, and his body went home to the royal crypt of the Superga basilica, above Turin. Porto kept his memory in the gardens next door, where a chapel built in his honour in 1854 stands at the end of the Avenida das Tílias, the lime-tree avenue.

Next to the Museu Romântico: the Crystal Palace gardens and Antiqvvm

Antiqvvm, chef Vítor Matos’s restaurant, shares the address and kept its two Michelin stars in the 2026 guide.