Museu das Crianças Lisbon: Closed, and Where to Go Instead

If you have been told about a children's museum inside the Lisbon Zoo — a place where kids could touch everything, run a pretend market, and play their way through an exhibition — you were told about something real. The Museu das Crianças existed, and families loved it.

It is not there any more.

We originally published this article as a visitor's guide. On re-checking it we found that the museum had closed, so we have rewritten the page rather than leave a guide to a place you cannot visit. Below is what we found, and where to take children instead.

Last reviewed: August 2026 — this page was fact-checked on this date against the museum's own website, the Lisbon Zoo's site, national news coverage and public listings.

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What Happened

The Museu das Crianças was a private non-profit run by the Associação Acordar História Adormecida. Founded in 1994 and modelled on the hands-on children's museums of northern Europe and the United States, it moved into a building at the Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa (Sete Rios) in 2005 and stayed there for about fifteen years. Its exhibitions rotated roughly every three years; the last one, on Portuguese history, opened in October 2018.

In spring 2020 the museum announced it was closing. Its director explained to national broadcaster RTP that the museum lived on school visits and birthday parties, that it had lost most of its sponsors, and that with schools shut it could no longer pay rent to the zoo. It gave notice on its contract.

It never came back. As of August 2026:

• The Lisbon Zoo's own website makes no mention of it anywhere.
• The museum's official domain, museudascriancas.eu, is now parked for sale.
• Its remaining website still carries the original notice that it is "temporarily closed" on the instruction of Lisbon City Council to prevent the spread of Covid-19 — a page frozen in 2020, with no content newer than 2018.
• Review sites hold only a handful of old reviews, none recent.

Plenty of tourism directories and listing sites still show it as open, with an address, a phone number and opening hours of 10:00 to 18:00. Those listings are recycled from before 2020. This is worth knowing in general: a directory entry is not evidence that a venue is trading.

If you were planning a visit: do not buy a zoo ticket expecting to find it. The zoo itself is very much open and worth the day — but the museum inside it is gone.

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What a Hands-On Museum Gives Children

It is worth saying why this kind of space matters, because it shapes what you should look for as a replacement.

A children's museum is built on the opposite rule to a conventional one. Nothing is behind glass. Children are meant to pull, press, build, pour and dismantle, and the learning arrives sideways while they are busy having fun. For under-sevens especially, that is not a lesser version of a museum visit — it is the only version that works, because their attention is held by their hands rather than by wall text.

The good news is that Lisbon has several places doing exactly this.

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Where to Go Instead

Pavilhão do Conhecimento — Ciência Viva

Lisbon's science centre at Parque das Nações is the closest thing to a direct replacement, and it is far bigger than the Museu das Crianças ever was. Everything is built to be operated by children: experiments, physical challenges, construction areas, and a dedicated space for the youngest visitors.

• Address: Largo José Mariano Gago 1, Parque das Nações, 1990-073 Lisboa
• Open: every day — 10:00 to 18:00 Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 19:00 at weekends and on public holidays
• Tickets: check current prices on the Pavilhão's own site before you go
• Getting there: Metro Oriente (Red line), then a short walk

Museu da Marioneta

The puppet museum, in a former convent in Madragoa, is small, quiet and a genuine hit with children who are not yet ready for a large museum. Its educational service runs family guided visits and creative workshops, so it is worth checking what is on before choosing a date.

• Address: Convento das Bernardas, Rua da Esperança 146, 1200-660 Lisboa
• Open: Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00 (last entry 17:30)
• Contact: +351 213 942 810

The Lisbon Zoo itself

The zoo that used to host the museum still runs its own programmes for children — a farm area with domestic animals, the cable car and the little train, plus a pedagogical centre that organises school programmes, holiday activities and weekend sessions. If your plan was "the zoo and the children's museum", the first half of it still works.

• Address: Praça Marechal Humberto Delgado, 1549-004 Lisboa
• Getting there: Metro Jardim Zoológico (Blue line) or Sete Rios station
• Note: opening hours are seasonal — longer in summer, shorter in winter

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How We Check Venues

We rewrote this page because a reader following our original advice would have driven across Lisbon for nothing. When we review a venue article we now look for four things, and it is a useful checklist if you are planning around any listing you find online:

1. A live official website or active social profile — not a directory entry someone else wrote.
2. A phone number or email that belongs to the venue, and a willingness to answer it.
3. Recent reviews. Five reviews, none from the last three years, usually means something.
4. Confirmation from a second, independent source — the venue's landlord, its municipality, or news coverage.

A venue that fails all four is very likely closed, whatever the listing says.

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Find Something for This Weekend

If you came here looking for an indoor, educational outing, you can browse everything we list under museums and cultural spaces or see all family activities around Lisbon on KidsToGo.

For more ideas, our guides to art and creative classes for kids in Lisbon and free activities for kids in Lisbon both include indoor options for a rainy Saturday.

And if you spot a venue on our site that has closed or moved, tell us — we would rather fix it than have another family make the trip.