museum or laboratory, that's on you
You walk in through an 18th-century door and you get that this wasn't built to keep things in. The Laboratório Químico da Universidade de Coimbra was put up on the orders of the Marquês de Pombal in 1772 to do serious science, not to display it. It was the first laboratory in Portugal dedicated to teaching and research in chemistry, and when the Museu da Ciência opened here in 2006, the building brought all that weight with it.
The permanent exhibition is called Segredos da Luz e da Matéria and it's interactive, which means you can touch, try things out and figure stuff out without needing a guide to explain. The collections of the Botany, Physics, Anthropology, Zoology and Mineralogy departments are in here, and each of them has enough substance to make you stop.
In 2013 The Best Colleges put this museum among the 30 best university museums in the world. It's not a title that impresses much out of context, but when you're inside the space and you look at what was restored by architects João Mendes Ribeiro, Desirée Pedro and Carlos Antunes, you start to see why. The intervention respected what was there before any museum.
Coimbra has the University spread across the whole hill, but this laboratory sits in a part of the city where you can still feel what it was to study here before science had screens.
what you'll find
- the restored Pombaline building, with the original architecture visible
- physical collections of zoology, mineralogy and anthropology
- an interactive exhibition with no fixed route
- rotating programming with an object of the month on display
- the historical context of the University of Coimbra in the 18th century
