Museu dos Transportes e Comunicações

In the monumental Alfandega Nova building on the Porto waterfront, the Museu dos Transportes e Comunicacoes explores how people and ideas have moved through the world. The museum occupies the city’s nineteenth-century customs house, one of the most striking neoclassical buildings in Porto, beside the River Douro.

A museum in the customs house

The museum was founded in 1992 and is housed in the Alfandega Nova, built from 1859 on the former beach at Miragaia. Its renovation, by the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, turned the old customs house into a space for exhibitions on transport, communications and the history of the building itself.

What to see

• Exhibitions on the history of transport, from the first automobiles to modern mobility.
• Displays on communications and the ways societies share knowledge and ideas.
• Metamorphosis of a Place, on the history of the customs house itself.
• The building’s grand halls and riverside setting, a short walk from the historic centre.

Visiting the museum

The museum is at Rua Nova da Alfandega, Edificio da Alfandega, 4050-429 Porto. It is open Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 to 13:00 and 14:00 to 18:00, and on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from 15:00 to 19:00. It is closed on Mondays, 1 January, Easter Sunday, 24 June and 25 December.

Tickets and visitor information: amtc.pt.

Image credit: Museu dos Transportes e Comunicacoes, Porto, by jad99, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The São Bento station, with its twenty thousand tiles, is part of the same journey.