Mundo a Vapor

Halfway between Canela and Gramado, this gloriously eccentric museum is devoted to the history of steam power. A few hundred working models depict trains, ships, factories, mills, and stationary engines. A real Watt-style beam engine has been reassembled inside. The whole place hums and clanks with whistles, pistons, and condensing steam.

It is best known internationally for the sculpture on the facade: a full-scale steam train apparently crashing out through the front wall, a permanent recreation of a famous 19th-century railway accident. Even visitors uninterested in industrial machinery come for that one photograph. Open daily; great with kids.

things to do museum
A story
The most photographed feature of Mundo a Vapor is a life-size model of a train crashing through the front of the building — a recreation of the 1895 Gare Montparnasse derailment in Paris. The original wreckage and its iconic photograph were a worldwide sensation; here the disaster is frozen in steel and concrete on the side of the road.

Other places in Things to Do