Taipa Houses Museum

The Taipa Houses Museum — Casas-Museu da Taipa in Portuguese — is a row of five lime-green colonial villas set around a manicured garden overlooking the bay in what was once Taipa Village's grandest address. Built in the Portuguese colonial style with verandas, high ceilings, and decorative tile work, the houses were restored and opened as a museum complex that offers the clearest glimpse anywhere in Macau of what Portuguese colonial domestic life looked like.

Each house covers a different theme — the history of Taipa Island, the Portuguese-Macanese community, and domestic interiors from the early 20th century. The garden connecting them is pleasant to sit in on cooler days, with views towards the mainland. The museum is free to enter and makes for an easy half-hour stopover before exploring the lanes of the old village behind it.

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A story
The five villas were built between 1921 and 1925 as summer residences for Macau's Portuguese colonial administration. They sat largely empty for decades after the colonial era ended, then were restored in the 1980s and opened as a museum complex. Each house has been given a different theme: one recreates a middle-class Portuguese home of the 1920s, another covers the history of Macau, a third focuses on the island's pre-casino life.

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