Lisboa Story Centre — Attraction in Lisbon

An audio tour through the museum to learn an overview of the history of Lisbon. The tour is laid-out Ikea style and you move through different sections. The audio tour setup recognizes the section you are in, and plays the appropriate recording.

We visited the Story center in the middle of our trip, and that was helpful, as we could pick out events and catch glimpses of monuments through our previous sight seeing activities, which made it more interesting.

They glossed over colonization by mentioning it as "trade", completely missing the devastating damage of colonization. I understand they want to present their country in the best light, but it's ok to acknowledge the lessons you have learned.

The tour provides a brief history of Lisbon through known times. There is more emphasis on the 1755 earthquake and the rebuilding, likely because most buildings prior to that are now lost. The video movie on the quake could be upsetting to younger children, so you might want to skip that section of you have kids. It presents more of the human emotions around the quake. Other factual information is covered in the exhibits.

There is another section upstairs where you can select specific events from Lisbon history, and learn more about them. That was most interesting to us, since we had heard of some events at other sightseeing locations and wanted to know more about them. If you have kids, do learn about the rhino vs elephant fight which didn't happen!

Everyone we interacted with was polite and helpful.

Overall, it is a great concept, and they could fix some issues to make it even better.

The audio and video are often out of sync, since the videos are looping at their own frequency, and you could enter the section in the middle of the video loop. This especially happens before the movie, and that is also the time you are figuring out how the system works. It might be good to start the tour with an auditorium setting so that everyone gets aligned to the video loop.

Bathrooms, or, WC, as they are known in Portugal, are after section 6, where they display trading goods. There is a small detour in the direction opposite to section 7. Easy to miss. One generally expects bathrooms at the entrance. We had to come back in to the exhibition area to use the restroom.

There is a virtual reality section upstairs, which requires a separate ticket. Ticket will be discounted with Lisboa Card, but not included in it.

If you want to see the virtual reality tour, you have to go back down, exit the exhibition area by scanning your ticket, then buy the ticket to the virtual reality tour and come back up through the exhibit. Too much trouble, we decided to skip it. They could either offer the tickets at the reception at the time of check-in, or allow people to buy tickets at the door to the virtual...

If I could give this place zero stars, I would. Please don't waste your time and money here, unless you're looking for factually incorrect, whitewashed, Eurocentric, racist, and dishonest colonial propaganda.

The museum requires you to take a headset which provides constant, cheesy narration as you walk through different areas of the (very sparse and uninteresting) exhibit of different cartoonish drawings and displays that are meant to reflect different periods of Lisbon's history. For a moment at the beginning of the exhibit, I honestly thought it was satire, because the script was so ridiculous. There is also an equally corny video depicting the earthquake of 1755, which is mostly just shots of bloodied and dead bodies with no actual information. Also, the headsets were glitchy and very difficult to operate.

The script itself completely glorifies Portugal's colonial history. The slave trade, the Inquisition, wars, etc are all either completely glossed over or described in a positive light with constant references to "the new world" and "heroic conquests of untouched lands" (never mind the Indigenous people who had been living/caring for those lands for centuries) and "Portugal's exciting contributions" etc etc. Moorish/Muslim history is completely glossed over and the exhibit is whitewashed and Eurocentric from start to finish.

I came to learn more about the city of Lisbon and I left feeling embarrassed for the city. I'm shocked to see that this museum is relatively well-rated. I find it disturbing that this exhibit is geared to children when it's 2022 and many other countries are actively working to decolonize children's education, and a museum like this would be met with immediate backlash in many...

English audiotour: Lacking storytelling with very low information density. Arbitrarily playing voice-overs with laughably bad and awkward voice acting.

The visuals added little to the audiotour if they were even related. The decor looked okay. Mostly confusing.

The film was badly acted, had a poor progression and comically dated computer generated imaging. The triple screen set-up didn't add anything and made the experience confusing and unimmersive.

Furthermore, the staff was unhelpful ('don't touch any buttons on the audiotour') which made this a weird journey. After figuring out how to pause and replay segments this became more bearable but clear instructions (either digital or from the staff) would be appreciated.

Wouldn't recommend this for anyone interested in the history of Lissabon, which certainly has a lot to offer. The vocabulary is too confusing for kids, but no self-respecting adult would find this tour interesting or enjoyable (maybe out of pity).

I feel this is the obvious opinion but the raving reviews on this page don't share...