Presentation

The Geological Museum began to be organized in 1859, when the "Geological Commission of the Kingdom" was installed on the upper floor of a former convent built in the 16th century.

The Museum's collection is composed of fossil specimens, archaeological objects, rocks and minerals, collected mainly within the scope of the mission of the Portuguese Geological Survey, successively designated as Geological Commissions, Geological Services of Portugal, Geological and Mining Institute and National Laboratory of Energy and Geology. It constitutes a collection of high scientific value and remarkable exhibition and didactic interest, unique and exclusive in the field of Paleontology, without parallel at the national level.

Among others, equally relevant from a scientific point of view, the collections resulting from fieldwork carried out under the direction of the pioneers of Portuguese Geology: Carlos Ribeiro, Nery Delgado, Paul Choffat and Jorge Cândido Berkeley Cotter, whose scientific interest, even today, confers upon them the status of reference collections at the service of the scientific community. The display mode of the collections, the exhibition furniture, and the interior architecture largely reflect the type of museology of the 19th century, of which few examples remain in Europe, leading specialists to consider it a "Museum of Museums".

The Geological Museum is part of the Portuguese Museum Network and, in 2010, was classified as a "Property of Public Interest," in recognition of "the incalculable scientific value of the collections it preserves and its complete exhibition space, which is already a reference in itself, of 19th-century museography, its systems of classification and presentation of pieces, in fact a 'museum of museums' of mineralogical, paleontological and archaeological history, whose recognition and preservation must be safeguarded within the framework of the classification of the whole."