Museums and Palaces

Housed in a 19th-century building, the Sintra Natural History Museum is located in Rua do Paço, in the town’s historic centre. It has a unique collection of thousands of fossils of great cultural and scientific value, put together over 50 years by the collector Miguel Barbosa and his wife, Fernanda Barbosa.

Besides its permanent exhibition, the Museum also has a temporary exhibition room designed to host a range of different events, a reserve and a laboratory for the treatment and study of its exhibits, a small and highly specialised Documentation Centre, as well as a shop and café. The exhibits are all displayed in a dynamic way, making use of the latest technologies and revealing modern designs in its furniture and equipment.

Visitors can also make use of an Educational Service, which is provided to them in keeping with the same spirit. This begins with the municipal collections of Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Malacology and Petrography, originating from all over the world, and uses these to show the whole evolution of life from the Earth’s formation to the mutations that it has undergone over millions of years in the course of different geological epochs, from the Pre-Cambrian to the Quaternary.