Pimenta Palace

After a long process of refurbishing the building, the Museum of Lisbon - Palácio Pimenta reopened for visitors on September 12, 2024.

The 11 renovated rooms on the second floor of the permanent exhibition now broaden the geographical and chronological horizons of the city's history, showing its urban, social and cultural evolution from the 17th century to the end of the 20th century, with Parque das Nações.

Through works as varied as models, engravings, paintings, photographs, furniture, ceramics and tiles, testimonies to a history that some still remember, new chapters are told in a narrative that is always under construction, about the evolution of this city, one of Europe's oldest capitals, which is transformed every day by those who live and visit it.

The work of Francisco Keil do Amaral (1910-1975) is deeply connected to Lisbon and the installation of the City Museum (today the Lisbon Museum) in the Pimenta Palace. Over the course of 27 years, the architect devised four proposals for the construction of a City Palace to crown the top of Parque Eduardo VII.

On the 50th anniversary of his death, this exhibition shows lesser-known aspects of these projects which, although they never came off the drawing board, are revealing of his evolution as an architect and of the urbanistic thinking he developed about Alto do Parque Eduardo VII.

A municipal architect for a decade (1938-1947) and on his own after that, the author developed several projects that changed the face of the city and gave it modernity and monumentality that are still present today.

Using objects from the Lisbon Museum, the Lisbon Municipal Archives and the Olisiponense Studies Office, this exhibition also highlights the constant relationship that existed between different architects and the projects that never came to fruition for the extension of Avenida da Liberdade, the Palácio da Justiça and the expansion of the exhibition area of the Palácio Pimenta - a long-held ambition of several generations of leaders of the City Museum and the current Lisbon Museum.

This guided tour of the permanent exhibition at the Museum of Lisbon - Palácio Pimenta offers a queer reading of Portuguese museum collections. André Murraças offers an alternative interpretation of some artifacts, documents and works of art that can illustrate another history: the queer history of Lisbon.