Macao Museum

Cultural heritage

The Macao Museum opened in 1998 atop Mount Fortress beside the Ruins of St. Paul's, the core institution for the city's history and culture. Across three floors it presents Macau's origins and early Sino-Western contact, its folk arts, traditional crafts and customs, and its contemporary urban life, spanning fishing, religion, festivals, opera and handicrafts, the finest window onto more than four centuries of Macau's East-West fusion.

Visiting: Climbing from beside the Ruins of St. Paul's one reaches Mount Fortress and the museum, where the ship models and early maps on the ground floor, the Cantonese-opera stage and carved deity statues and temple-fair scenes on the first, let visitors take in Macau's transformation from fishing village to international port at a glance; from the fortress platform the whole historic centre lies below, the best vantage to grasp the shape of Macau's culture.