Museu Carlos Machado

The Museu Carlos Machado is the oldest museum in the Azores and the natural starting point for understanding island life in the middle of the Atlantic. Spread across several historic buildings in Ponta Delgada, it brings together art, sacred art, ethnography, natural history and a surprising collection of vehicles. For visitors to Sao Miguel, it offers a compact but genuinely wide-ranging introduction to Azorean identity.

The oldest museum in the Azores

The museum was created in 1876 by the naturalist and physician Carlos Maria Gomes Machado and opened to the public on 10 June 1880, at the then National Lyceum of Ponta Delgada, with collections of zoology, botany, geology and mineralogy. It passed to the municipality in 1890 and, from 1914, was named in honour of its founder. Its collections have grown for well over a century into a regional museum of national and international value.

Today the museum is a polynuclear institution. Its principal venues include the Nucleo de Santa Barbara (art and sacred art), the Nucleo de Santo Andre (natural history and the Memory of the Convent circuit) and the newest nucleus at the Palacio da Conceicao, devoted to Azorean autonomy. This structure allows visitors to move between art, science and history within the city.

Highlights of the collection

• Art, sacred art and decorative arts, together with furniture and numismatics.
• Regional and African ethnography, dress and textiles, and toys.
• Musical instruments and photography.
• Geology, archaeology and natural history, rooted in the museum’s nineteenth-century origins.
• Transportation, including a Bugatti Brescia T23 that has been part of the collection since 1997.

Visiting the museum

The main nucleus is at Nucleo de Santa Barbara, 9500-105 Ponta Delgada, on the island of Sao Miguel. It is open from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-17:30, and is closed on Mondays. Allow one and a half to two and a half hours for the principal nucleus, and more if you plan to visit several venues.

Full visitor information: museucarlosmachado.azores.gov.pt.

Image credit: Museu Carlos Machado, Ponta Delgada, by Robert Cutts, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.