Travel Guides

The exhibition building of the Maritime Museum was built at the place where the first batch of Portuguese landed. The Museum looks like a special vessel anchored at the bay where the fishermen lived. The white outer wall looks like a ship with three masts full wind.

On the 8th November 1987 Captain Emilio da Sousa, a Portuguese Master Mariner and his selected 17 crew set sail for Mossel Bay and arrived on 3rd February 1988, 500 years after Bartolomeu Dias. The trip lasted 3 months, compared to the 6 month trip Dias had taken. The trip went well except off the Namibian coast where the auxiliary engine was used. The Maritme Museum is located at Quayside Road near the Melaka River estuary. The replica is 34 metres high, 36 metres long and 8 metres wide.
The museum, which was founded in 1863, is today housed in the old Jeronimos Monastery, Belem, on the banks of the Tagus. An unfortunate fire in 1916 destroyed the old Escola Naval and with that also almost the entire collection of ship models dating from the beginning of the 19th century.

The Maritime Museum’s collection is very diverse, both in term of the nature of the materials used and also in terms of themes approached. Under the maritime spirit and calling, the Exhibition Rooms are enriched and open to a continuous process of investigation. The Museum has some 17,000 items and an extensive archive which includes 30,000 photographs. Its permanent display comprises about 2,500 items. These include magnificent collections of ship models covering every era from the 15th and 16th-century Voyages of Discovery to modern super-tankers. The Aquarium Gallery in the museum has four tanks. Each devoted to a different theme of the sub-water world. The first presents a fresh water riverbed, the second a harbor and the third a coral reef. The last tank features the scenes of a sunken boat in the deep sea. There is a square outside of the museum that visitors should not miss.