National Coach Museum

Museum · BelémLisbon,Portugal

Three centuries of carriages in Lisbon walked forward in order, from an unsprung travelling box to three Roman-built coaches used for a single day.

The National Coach Museum is arranged so that you walk forward through three centuries of carriages. It starts with a plain seventeenth-century travelling coach with no springs at all, its body slung on leather straps, which tells you what a journey across Portugal actually felt like. It ends with the last royal carriages of the nineteenth century, upholstered, lamped and sprung. In between stand three that were never really vehicles. Those three were sent to Rome and back for a single day's use in 1716, and they have been kept ever since. What is worth doing is walking round behind them, because the whole design points that way. The driver's end is plain and the rear is a stage, with carved figures leaning outward over the axle so that they read from below. The bodies hang on leather straps rather than sitting on the frame, which is what passed for suspension. Nothing in the museum after them tries the same thing again.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Part of the collection stands across the avenue — the old royal riding school opposite still shows some of the coaches, and it is a separate door from the main hall.
It is the quiet option in Belém — the monastery down the street can queue for an hour in season and this hall almost never does, which makes it a sensible first stop of the day.
The hall is flat and open — no stairs, wide aisles and objects at eye level, which makes it one of the easier museums in the city with children or a pushchair.

Things to do

1
Go round the back of the embassy coaches
Find the three 1716 coaches and walk to the rear of each. Most of the carving is there: gilded figures of oceans and continents piled above the axle. They were made that way because a crowd watching a procession sees each coach from behind as it passes, and those figures were there to tell the crowd how important Portugal was.
2
Start with the coach that has no springs
Find the earliest vehicle in the hall, a plain leather-and-timber box slung on straps. A seventeenth-century monarch travelled in that. Looking at it first makes clear what the gilded coaches further down the room were for: they were no more comfortable, they were public display, paid for out of the crown's gold monopoly.
3
Finish with the last royal carriages
At the far end are the nineteenth-century royal carriages: plainer, fitted with springs, and closer to a car than to a parade float. The line stops in 1910, when the monarchy ended. Walking from the 1716 coaches down to these covers the whole working life of the Portuguese court.