This handsome building carries a far more troubled history than its museum signs suggest. Built as a family home at the end of the nineteenth century, it later sheltered Spanish nuns during the Spanish Civil War. From the 1940s until 1974, it housed Porto’s delegation of the PIDE/DGS secret police.
That past gives the present museum an unusual weight. The Military Museum of Porto was created in 1977 and opened to the public in March 1980, with President Ramalho Eanes presiding over the inauguration. It belongs to the Portuguese Army and preserves the country’s military heritage.
While you are safely stopped on the pavement, take in the building’s neoclassical character: it was designed for domestic life, not originally for displays of cannon and uniforms. Inside, its signature attraction is a vast sequence of about 16,000 miniature figures, tracing soldiers from prehistoric times to the present. The collections also include artillery and military vehicles spanning the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, as well as a room devoted to Porto’s 31 January 1891 uprising, the first effort to establish a Portuguese republic. A small specialist library completes a museum that moves from tiny model soldiers to the machinery of war.
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