Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
Modernist museum in a garden setting holding Calouste Gulbenkian's encyclopaedic art collection.
The museum holds the collection assembled by the Armenian-born oil magnate Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, who settled in Lisbon in 1942 and left his holdings to a Portuguese foundation. Roughly six thousand items span some five millennia, from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman antiquities to Islamic manuscripts, Armenian bindings, Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquer. The European galleries follow with medieval ivories, French decorative arts, and paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Turner, Manet and Renoir, closing with a celebrated room of René Lalique jewellery and glass.
The building opened in 1969 to a design by Ruy Jervis d'Athouguia, Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa, with the surrounding park laid out by Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and António Viana Barreto. Low, horizontal and built of exposed concrete, it is a landmark of Portuguese modernism, with glazed walls that open galleries onto lawns and water. After eighteen months of refurbishment the museum reopened on 18 July 2026, restoring its original materials and adding a numismatics room in a former study.
Highlights
- Founder's Collection spanning Egyptian antiquity to nineteenth-century Europe
- Lalique room of Art Nouveau jewellery and glass
- Exposed-concrete modernist building set in a listed garden
- New numismatics room opened with the 2026 refurbishment
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