Porto: World Of Discoveries Museum

We went in the morning. There are only three rooms In the museum and the queue for the boat started in the second one, we didn't realise this. The queue for the boat was well over an hour. There was no warning, no queue management and no signs telling you queue duration. Several families in front of us gave up after queuing for over half an hour. I was reading the reviews in the queue and people report up to 2.5 hour queues! The boat ride was actually ok, and quite interesting. It was only 20 minutes because it was so slow though. By the time we got off the queue was probably down to about 10 minutes. So be very careful when you go. I would say this place somewhat ruined our day as it threw off our timing and it's not in a great area for getting lunch with a family either. There are better places to go in Porto.

We passed an interesting couple of hours here looking at Portugal's history with the children. There's plenty of information on interactive panels that helps to maintain the interest. The boat journey is a different and engaging approach.

Pretty cool place to learn a little and spend an hour or so. It’s all very well done. Lots of interesting information about Porto and trade. Lots of touch screens to scroll and learn and then sit on a boat ride to have a chance to learn some more. Definitely enjoyed it.

Missing first a general overview of the Portuguese discoveries with a timeline. A lot of information was too detailed without enough background. A lot of touch screen and interactive without a single anti bacterial machine working.

An interesting intro to Portugal's history, although not much held the kids attention until the boat ride, which was a fair amount of time and the hosts were fun and kind.

Crowded, hot, poorly controlled, aging and failing exhibits. We booked this last minute at the request of my ten year old and what a disappointment. The ticket scanners were down, multiple displays had Windows errors on them. The ship, workshop and other displays were very run down with age (cracks, missing elements, chipped paint). The air conditioning wasn’t working for the bulk of the exhibits and we waited in line for 15 minutes for the boat tour. Don’t expect any animatronics, everything is a tired looking mannequin or static sculpture. While somewhat informative, this is not worth the price of admission and only children 7 and under will find it interesting.

Fun and would recommend. It’s a little off the beaten path and the museum is nothing special BUT the boat ride is very cute and 22 minutes long. Worth it for something fun for toddlers and young kids

Boring and really outdated. A lot of the things not working. Unfriendly employees. Disney did this better 60 years ago

My family entered to attraction and I wanted to wait in restaurant by drinking coffee and later when my wife and son will finish atraction to have some food, but person who met at restaurant said that this place is restaurant and for food not for coffee. I mention that my family will join later and we will have food, but he didn't want serve me. It is quite strange, when so many empty tables and few customer and do not want to serve coffee and later food. I don't think that is good for business and customers. Restaurant lost three customers and got bad review from me.

Great fun experience. Nice break from the heat. Completed in less than an hour so relatively expensive but enjoyable

Great service starting with the shuttle service, great guides and equipment. The tour route was very scenic and a great combination of off road and educational stops. Highly recommended!!

When we arrived at the ticket-desk, the girl there didn't speak a word of English. That is ridiculous! This is one of the main tourist attractions in the city, and we are in 2026! And as far as I know, English is not exactly an exotic language... :( :(

It was a little jaded. The interactive activities didn’t work very well. The boat ride could be updated, The ride became a bit boring. It wasn’t as fun as we expected. A four year old didn’t engage with it at all but perhaps he was a little young. However with a little bit of updating I think it could appeal to all ages.

We arrived at noon for the noon slot and were told we would have to wait 90 minutes for the boat experience . We went inside for 10 minutes and on seeing such a long queue for boat ride asked at reception could we leave and come back at y t he time they had told us previously. To our surprise the delay was 3 hours. Obviously we asked for a refund but they insisted they could only refund us 50%. Very disappointing.

Definitely not much to it. Thought it would be longer with more exhibits. The staff at the gate told us it was packed when we got there & we would have to wait an hour for the boat ride. The wait was about 20 minutes, which really was no big deal. Likely would not recommend.

Small and a bit pricey for what you get. Kids were a bit bored but mine are 11 and 13 so a bit too old for this type of museum. The boat ride adds a bit of excitement but the queue was about 40 minutes.

As mentioned by a prevoius reviewer - the exibits are situated in 4 not overly large rooms. So that’s 20 minutes… Then you have a 20 minutes long boat ride with nice scenery, but certain parts definitely need a new coat of paint and upgrading in general needs to be done here. So our visit lasted 40 minutes and the tickets (two adults, two teenagers) were 66 Eur. The price / experience ratio is not favourable for this place.

An amazing experience, well worth the money paid, boat cruise ended the experience brilliantly. Good for children and adults

Great experience! We went as a last resort to use up time before an experience. Interesting museum showing the history of Portugal and how they explored the world. The best part is the boat ride through interactive displays. Very well designed.

It is a nice musuem very interactive. At the end there is a boat ride. We got the boat with German story although we aske for English. Try to make sure they have set the correct language before you take off. I tried buying tickets online but it said there were sold out so we went there in person and bought the tickets without any problem. There is usually a line for the boat ride but we waited only 20-30 minutes.

A local told us about this museum that I didn’t see listed as one of the top things to visit in Porto. We all enjoyed this museum very much, including our teenage boys that were very tired of seeing churches. I especially enjoyed the video display that showed all the major expeditions in the 1400s and 1500s and the routes. There was even a boat ride like the theme park that was very entertaining and educational. Must visit for anyone that is interested in Portuguese history.

Excellent and unique interactive museum about discoveries of Portuguese sailors through the history, especially great for children but not only for them. Interactive part of exhibition where you go boating through the new worlds and even could smell the scents, feel the storms etc. is the best.

I visited this museum off-peak in the morning with my three children and we thoroughly enjoyed it! There are 4 separate rooms - the first has model ships in it; the second has some cool interactive globes that show maps from different years; the third has armour and models of how they lived on the ships; the fourth has woodwork etc. There are interactive screens to find out more information. Only one screen wasn't working when we were there. The highlight was the 22-minute boat ride. It goes very slowly around the various places the explorers went to. If you have young children with you, be aware there is one "bang" followed by a splash in the water ahead of you (to simulate a canon ball), and you go through a dark-ish tunnel - but there is nothing particularly scary at any point and the boat is very smooth throughout. I knew from other reviews that you can end up waiting a long time to get on the boat - we visited around 11am on a weekday and walked straight on when we were ready, so we had no such problem. It is expensive alright, but certainly a unique museum experience!

Really enjoyed the experience. We loved the boat trip - it was extremely well presented and interesting. Well worth the visit. Great for families.

Truly dreadful - an experience that is expensive, dull & disappointing. The museum consists of 4 rooms of objects of potentially moderate interest, but you'll struggle to find out much about these exhibits because of the lousy, unresponsive touchscreens which are the only source of information. These four rooms are worth about 15 mins of your time in total, or half an hour at a real stretch. Then there's the fabled boat ride. The queue for this appears to be permanently in the 60 - 90 minute range, at least in summer when we visited. We had bought timed-entrance tickets for the museum, but there's no such thing as a timed entrance for the boat ride, so the only option is for the entire family to queue that whole time in an airless corridor. We refused to do so, and I struggle to imagine why anyone would. I also struggle to believe that the same people who put together 4 dull rooms are capable of putting together a boat ride that would make up for that wait time. Having visited truly world-class interactive museums such as the Jorvik Viking Centre in York or the Carlsberg Museum in Copenhagen, I can honestly say the World of Discoveries is the biggest waste of money of any museum I've ever visited. It cost 2 adults and 2 kids over 50 Euros, and wasn't worth a tenth of that.

Horrible. A waiting queue for more than an hour. To be fair they warned us of the queue. However, I was under the impression this museum had more to offer than this boat ride. Disappointing, the rest of the museum you see within 10 min. Despite paying for the entrance fees, we turned around and left. My advice, if they tell you the waiting time is more than 30 min then don’t pay the entrance fee, just leave.

We saw this whilst doing the blue bus tour -googled it and decided to visit the next door, we were aware it's aimed at younger people and this was evident when we arrived as we missed the entire 1st room as it was full of children on a school trip but we loved every other room and were blown away by the boat ride, we absolutely loved it. We took loads of photos and felt it was money well spent. As we were leaving lots more school children around but didn't bother us at all. Great learning for them. We loved the rhino!

Wonderful way to learn the history of Portugal. Great info and a fun ride through time. It was great to have the explanations in English.

The concept was attractive but the performance was below expectations… it s a bit expensive for thé content as only 4 rooms in total make the show. Some of the screens and animations are down which is not professional. It was almost aligned with the comments I be checked before boooking so I wasn’t that much disappointed. With few efforts they could do much better.

Interesting museum, but sadly if you have mobility issues you cannot get in and out of the boats as they don’t stop. So I had to sit and wait while others in my party went round. Felt disappointed and left out - surprising in this day and age tgat they don’t allow for disabled people

My adult daughter and I actually went into the area to catch the Freida immersive exhibit only to find it wasn't available to 3:30 and we had a 12:30 pick up= Banksy was also there but we thought we could not give it justice in the time we had so why not the world of discovery- it was right there I think it's great for kids but informing for adults as well - lots of interactive boards giving information about the explorations and voyagers and explorers, rooms depicting the actual visuals and artifacts of the ships quarters The boat trip at the end was an unexpected pleasure and real treat - a pleasant young attendant assisted this senior into the boat, our audio in English worked ,we went through the timeline of history- some of it might be a little intimidating for young children, it gets dark; but in all in was a delight- I loved it Picked up my Portugal souvenirs for the elementary folks on my list - glad we went

The Museum is dedicated to present all the Discoveries Portugal took under. Starts with some stories to be read (or listened to fvia the Audio Guide) on the Screens - which tend to not work sometimes and some types of ship presented, that the Portuguese used. There were some Globes that should have lightened up and show the path of the voyage; however, only a couple worked. The part where you could basically go into the body of the ship, was nicely furnished (there not even the spider webs were disturbing). After that came the journey on water (still in the Museum), where in a boat, we were navigated through the Discoveries (although, we know that life has some dirt in it, maybe a cleaning would make the journey more colorful).

Stabdart Dark Boat ride which could have been interesting if the operators had bothered to even turn on the sound. As it is it was a waste of money.

A disgusting experience. I and my 3 year old kid waited, together with 2 more families with small kids, for more than an hour to enter the boats. The employees didn't alert us that we needed to wait that all school trips to embark and didn't let us pass. They were extremely rude, they didn't give a damn. People are gathered in a small, stuffy space with no covid protection. The boats are not wiped or cleaned at all. The ticket is over-priced and the exhibition is poor. I'm Portuguese and felt disgusted with the heroic perspective used in the exhibition, and it's full of historical and biological inaccuracies (for example, arigato does NOT come from Portuguese obrigado, and they put a tiger!!! in the African environment, together with hippos and leopards). It's cringe and awful, don't recommend it at all. They only want to suck out your money.

A totally non-critical and self-centered view on Portuguese colonialism. On first scene the ”brave” ”innocent” Portuguese soldiers get shot at by smug-looking Arabs; Goa upgrades, if by magic, to a Portuguese city (actually Portuguese first fired it to smithereens and then only landed) and porcellain is smuggled (read stolen) from China. And the easy gloves on atrocities in Brazil, with slavery barely mentioned. Good only if you’ve raised your children on Tarzan books and want them to be good colonialists. Ps. And oh, online ticket booking was out of order.

Loved the boat ride, but the employees dressed in sixteenth century garb was definitely a highlight.

My husband and I spent about 30-45 minutes visiting the museum, including the boat ride. The boat ride is really the biggest part of the visit, as the beginning portion only takes a few minutes to view the several exhibits. If you are really into history, you may find yourself spending more time navigating through the interactive screens and reading up on some facts. We found the boat ride very interesting and were impressed by all the different displays and special effects. Worth a visit if you are in the area!

Visited here with my partner on our recent trip to Porto. Lots of interesting stuff to look at / learn and the visit is finished off with a really good boat trip which tours around different 'parts of the world'. Gives a different perspective to Porto compared to a lot of the tourist things so if you like history and learning about the place you're in, visit here.

Full of interesting facts, great setup with the boat ride through the exhibition. Well setup and friendly staff

Museum very nice, the prepaid tickets "skip the line" took 20 minutes to exchange for real tickets. Normal ticket buyers interrupted the process and got in much quicker

It was quite ok as a museum but required a lot of reading so was a bit dry for us (even me as an adult). The boat ride at the end was quite fun. Not sure I would recommend as it was quite expensive.

<p>I think it's aimed at kids, but I really enjoyed it!</p>

We went with our 5 year old who loved the boat trip, especially the humidity change in the rainforest and the smells of the east

<p>Fantastic museum highly recommend for everyone of all ages</p>

<p>It was cute. Not at all what I expected. I would assume that it would be very interesting with kids.</p>

<p>This was a really nice museum and the price was a bit cheaper than you'd pay at the door.</p>

<p>This was an awesome tour! And the location was a plus. We are looking forward to returning to this location.</p>

<p>What in unexpected delight! From a quite uninspiring exterior the World of Discoveries was an incredible experience. To discover the extent of Portuguese exploration to the new world and to have a glimpse on what life on board the ships would have been like was extraordinary. Your initial concept of the size of the building makes you wonder if there really is a boat ride. The ride through history was certainly a highlight. The concept, displays and overall experience was incredible. Then there was the lunch - another winner. A great selection of tapas served by friendly and helpful staff. A fantastic tour for the young and young at heart.</p>

<p>Very informative staff and keen to help. Very enjoyable trip.</p>