Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro

Portugal's most important national sculpture museum, sitting above a 1st-century Roman forum

The Machado de Castro Museum is housed in the former episcopal palace — a complex, irregular building that grew over eight centuries — and is named after the great 18th-century Portuguese sculptor who was born in Coimbra. The collection spans Portuguese medieval and Renaissance sculpture, decorative arts, and a remarkable assembly of religious silverware.

The highlight for most visitors is not the art but the Roman cryptoporticus underneath: a 1st-century vaulted gallery that formed the substructure of the Roman forum of Aeminium, the ancient name of Coimbra. It is one of the best-preserved Roman structures in Portugal and you can walk through it as part of the standard museum visit.

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Beneath the museum lies a perfectly preserved Roman cryptoporticus — a vaulted underground gallery built in the 1st century AD to support the forum above. You walk through it as part of the museum visit, and the contrast between the dark Roman tunnels and the Renaissance bishop's palace above them is genuinely strange.