Royal carriages travel to sleek new Lisbon digs
LISBON, Portugal — One of Lisbon’s most popular tourist attractions has a new home for its 110th birthday. But what’s on display inside has been turning heads for centuries.
The National Coach Museum, which offers a glimpse of the fabulous wealth Portugal possessed during the days of empire, has moved out of the ornate 18th-century horse-riding arena it long called home.
Its new and bigger venue is across the road: a sleek, minimalist 21st-century building designed by acclaimed Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
Why spend a couple of hours inside a coach museum in a city as seductive as Lisbon? Because, says secretary of state for culture Jorge Barreto Xavier, its celebrated collection of horse-drawn carriages, coaches and cabriolets from between the 16th and 19th centuries can’t be found anywhere else.
It is “the best and biggest collection of royal coaches in the world,” Barreto Xavier told the AP. The exhibits are also in excellent condition.
The oldest coach on display is one that Philip III of Spain used on his visit to Portugal in 1619.
But the show-stealer is the Coach of the Oceans. About eight metres long and close to three metres high, it has baroque wooden carvings of human figures and cherubs, set off in gold leaf. It is upholstered in red velvet and golden silk.
It was part of a Portuguese envoy’s cortege of 15 coaches sent by King Joao V to visit Pope Clement XI in 1716. The procession through the streets of Rome turned eyes and set tongues wagging — and was part of the monarch’s attempt to project Portuguese power.
The museum’s site beside the River Tagus was the ground zero of Portugal’s imperial ambitions. It lies near where Portuguese explorers like Vasco da Gama set off on daring voyages in the 15th and 16th centuries, bringing back fantastic riches from imperial outposts in Africa, Asia and South America. Lisbon was one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
This riverside district, called Belem (Bethlehem), is Portugal’s most popular tourist draw. As well as the coach museum, it includes the imposing Jeronimos church and monastery and the Tower of Belem, both from the 16th century. More recently, the area has added the Berardo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, featuring works by Picasso, Andy Warhol, Man Ray and many more.
Up to two million tourists a year head to Belem. The government hopes the new coach museum will help push that up to three million.
Portugal, a country of 10.5 million people, would certainly welcome the bigger numbers. It needed an emergency loan of 78 billion euros ($106 billion Cdn) in 2011 when it almost went bankrupt amid the debt crisis that engulfed countries using the euro. Work on the new coach museum building was completed in 2012, but the government couldn’t afford to open it.
These modern troubles stand in pronounced contrast to the country’s longago prosperity.
Portuguese royals, like other European monarchs, travelled in grand style and their coaches — like today’s luxury cars — were a status symbol. The museum’s only rival, Bessone said in an interview, is a collection at the Kremlin in Moscow, but it’s not on display.
Whereas wars and revolutions spelled the end of many European monarchs’ riches, Portugal’s royalty was relatively unscathed. When Queen Amelia happened across several dozen of her coaches gathering dust, she was able to clean up 29 of them for a display in 1905.
She lost her pet project five years later, when her husband, King Carlos I, was assassinated and Portugal became a republic.