Museo Romántico (Palacio Brunet)

The Museo Romántico occupies the Palacio Brunet, the grandest of the mansions on the Plaza Mayor, built in 1812 for the wealthy Brunet family and later home to the Conde de Brunet. The museum preserves the house as it was furnished in the mid-19th century: Italian marble floors, frescoed ceilings, French porcelain, and heavy mahogany furniture imported from Europe.

The collection documents the material culture of Trinidad's sugar aristocracy at its height — and some objects are remarkable for what they reveal about the scale of wealth involved. The famous marble bath is one example; the quality of the silver, the mirrors, and the musical instruments throughout the house is another. The interior courtyard with its original fountain and orange trees is a particularly cool and beautiful space. Modest admission fee; no photography inside.

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The museum's centrepiece is a marble bathtub that weighs 1.5 tonnes, shipped from Europe at extraordinary expense in the 1840s. The Brunet family who commissioned it had made their fortune from sugar and enslaved labour; the bathtub is a measure of how completely wealth insulates from reality — and of what 19th-century Trinidad's wealthy class considered a reasonable domestic accessory.

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