MAC/CCB

Inside the stone complex of Centro Cultural de Belém, MAC/CCB brings modern and contemporary art into a district better known for royal and maritime monuments. The museum draws on several collections, including the Berardo collection, and gives visitors a broad range of approaches to painting, sculpture and other forms of art.

You can come for familiar names, but the more interesting visit leaves room for unfamiliar work. Notice how an artist uses colour, how a sculpture occupies space or how an image changes when you see its true size. The galleries invite comparisons across different kinds of work. Give yourself time with the works that catch your eye, rather than feeling obliged to understand everything on display.

This is a strong choice for anyone interested in twentieth-century art, contemporary practice or architecture. It can also work for a curious newcomer willing to spend time with a few pieces. If your main interest is old master painting or furnished historic rooms, choose a museum with that focus instead.

Centro Cultural de Belém established a substantial setting for exhibitions, performance and public life in the early 1990s. Architects Vittorio Gregotti and Manuel Salgado designed a complex of connected buildings and outdoor spaces, rather than a single isolated hall. That arrangement still shapes the way a visit unfolds.

The exhibition centre later became closely associated with the Berardo Museum. MAC/CCB opened in 2023 with a wider institutional remit for contemporary art and architecture. Older guidebooks may use the previous name, but it is the same cultural complex, not a second museum elsewhere in Belém.

The collections give the museum a broad range of work to draw on. The Berardo holdings provide an important account of international modernism; the wider collections and architecture programme extend the range. Displays change, so the enduring reason to visit is that breadth rather than a particular temporary exhibition.