Portugal's National Museums and Monuments Lose 221,929 Visitors in 2025 — Jerónimos Holds Above One Million While 17 Sites Sit Closed for PRR Works

The 38 national museums, monuments and palaces under the management of the public company Museus e Monumentos de Portugal (MMP) recorded 4,843,299 visitors in 2025, a fall of 4.38% on the 2024 total — equivalent to 221,929 fewer visits, MMP confirmed in its annual balance released on Wednesday and reported by Lusa.

The drop is the second consecutive annual decline, after the 1.8% slip from 2023's 5,157,404 to 2024's 5,065,228. MMP attributes the 2025 fall directly to the total or partial closure of multiple museums and monuments for works under the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR). Seventeen sites — close to half of the network — were either completely closed, partially closed or operating with conditioned access during 2025.

The list of closures reads as a who's-who of Portuguese cultural heritage. The Torre de Belém has been closed since April 2025. The Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisboa shut in October 2025. The Museu de Lamego closed in May 2025. The Museu do Abade de Baçal in Bragança was shut from February to November 2025. Each of those sites is, in normal years, a meaningful contributor to the annual visitor count, and the calendar of PRR-financed structural works runs into 2026 and 2027.

Inside the surviving open network, the rankings stayed largely stable. The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos remained the runaway leader with 1,040,203 entries, the only site above one million. Behind it: the Paço dos Duques in Guimarães at 367,537, the Mosteiro da Batalha at 357,116, the Convento de Cristo in Tomar at 350,813, the Museu Nacional do Azulejo at 335,255, the Fortaleza de Sagres at 324,926 and the Castelo de Guimarães at 320,068. The Mosteiro de Alcobaça, also UNESCO-listed, recorded 195,611 entries; the Palácio Nacional de Mafra, 151,069. The Palácio Nacional da Ajuda drew 146,130 and the part-closed Torre de Belém still mustered 127,791 visits in the months it was open.

The visitor mix tells the rest of the story. 56% of all visitors were foreign (2,713,889 of 4,843,299), against 44% Portuguese (2,129,410). Paid entries totalled 2,978,173 — 61% of total entries — with the remaining 1,865,126 entering free of charge under the network's various concessions (under-12s, pensioners, Cartão do Cidadão Sénior, residents of the parish in which the monument is located).

For foreign residents, the closures matter on the practical level. Anyone planning a domestic-tourism weekend should check the museus.gov.pt portal for the operational calendar of each site before travelling — the seventeen-site closure list is large enough that a weekend trip can run into a closed Museu de Lamego or a closed Torre de Belém without warning. The Cartão do Cidadão Sénior and the Cartão de Residente Local concessions still apply when sites do reopen. The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos remains the network's single anchor, holding above one million visitors in a year when the wider portfolio shed more than 220,000.

Sources: Lusa report on the MMP 2025 balance (30 April 2026); MMP communiqué; INE-aligned visitor-count series.