National Museum of Nicaragua (Palacio Nacional de la Cultura)
Fourteen galleries of archaeology, natural history and Nicaraguan art in the former congress building.
The Palacio Nacional was commissioned in 1935 after the earthquake of 1931 destroyed much of central Managua, and was built to designs by the Belgian-born architect Pablo Dambach, who also worked on the city's Santiago cathedral. Its long neoclassical colonnade faces the Plaza de la Revolución. The building housed the national congress for more than fifty years, withstood the 1972 earthquake that flattened the surrounding blocks, and was the scene of the Sandinista seizure of the legislature in August 1978.
Since 1997 the palace has held the National Museum of Nicaragua, together with the national archive, the national library and the offices of the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture. Fourteen halls run from palaeontology and geology through pre-Columbian ceramics and stone statuary to colonial religious art, nineteenth-century portraiture and displays on national symbols, dress and crafts. Visits normally begin in the lobby, where a guide is assigned to accompany visitors through the sequence of rooms and the interior courtyards.
Highlights
- Fourteen exhibition halls in the former national congress building
- Pre-Columbian ceramics and carved stone statuary from the Pacific lowlands
- Palaeontological and natural-history collections of Nicaragua
- Neoclassical colonnade facing the Plaza de la Revolución
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