Brazil Lost 80 Percent of Its National Museum Collection in One Night. Here's How It's Fighting to Rebuild
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An aerial view shows the construction at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.<br>Brazil's Museu Nacional
The news arrived with both excitement and a pang of grief: The oldest national history museum in the Americas was slated to partially reopen for the first time since a 2018 fire destroyed more than 16 million objects—80 percent of its collections. “We put out tickets; it sold out in hours,” says Ronaldo Fernandes, director of the 208-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
Before the fire, some 300,000 Brazilian schoolchildren visited the museum each year. My partner had been one of them, so I got us free tickets to the temporary exhibition in September 2025. The building, Paço São Cristóvão, was a former residence of Portuguese and Brazilian monarchs, and it was as regal as she remembered it. We found that the yellow-and-white facade had been restored, along with 30 statues of Greek gods that adorned the roofline. Inside, the Bendegó meteorite, a 11,820-pound space rock found in Brazil in 1784, had survived the flames and was still on display in the entry room.
But noticeable changes were everywhere. Some walls remained blackened from the flames. Steel support beams were still twisted and exposed. On the positive side of the experience, we saw new acquisitions, including a 51-and-a-half-foot-long sperm whale skeleton that hung from a fresh 138-glass-panel skylight. I left wanting more—but I would have to wait. The museum is still rebuilding its spaces and collections, targeting a 2029 reopening date.
The fire on September 2, 2018, began with an electrical issue, but it spiraled out of control when the hydrants next to the building proved to be dry. According to a 160-page report by Alexander Kellner, the museum’s director at the time, the museum had been chronically underfunded for years, and a whistleblower had warned of fire risk as early as 2004.
“The week before the fire, we had a discussion with a fire prevention specialist,” says Fernandes, who was assistant director during the fire and took over the leading role earlier this year. New maintenance funding had recently arrived, in honor of the museum’s 200th anniversary, but the blaze happened before the prevention work could begin.
Did you know? What happened in the fire?
According to local authorities, the fire was sparked by an improperly installed air conditioner. They also cited inadequate fire saftery measures, including the lack of water sprinklers and fire doors, which allowed the blaze to engulf the museum.
The Bendegó meteorite, a 11,820-pound space rock, was found in Brazil in 1784.
Brazil's Museu Nacional
The morning after the fire, hundreds of people gathered outside the museum’s gates to see the extent of the damage. When some tried to jump the fence, the police responded with tear gas and pepper spray. The outer walls, which had been solidly built by enslaved Africans, remained intact. But historian Regina Dantas remembers entering her third-floor office and seeing that everything inside had been incinerated. “I cried profusely,” says Dantas. “I lost everything—I didn’t have a pen.”
Items stored in nearby buildings were safe from the blaze: Torah scrolls from the 13th or 14th century, the vertebrate and herbarium collections and a 500,000-volume library. Some researchers dashed into the main building during the fire’s early stages and saved precious specimens that had been used to define entire species. But the losses included Egyptian mummies, a royal Hawaiian feather cloak gifted to Brazil’s last regent, audio recordings of Indigenous languages no longer spoken and the museum’s entire insect collection.
A nonprofit called Projeto Museu Nacional Vive—or The National Museum Is Alive—is raising funds for the museum’s reopening, with backing from UNESCO, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Vale Cultural Institute. But the project is still about $29 million short. Funding isn’t coming as easily as it did for Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral, which drew pledges totaling nearly $1 billion in the first two days after its 2019 fire. Some of the largest donations came from the families that owned luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent. “In France, the culture of donating money for the reconstruction of buildings and storage of historical heritage is much different from here,” says Larissa Graça, the technical manager of the fundraising nonprofit.
Brazil’s Ministry of Education provided about $2.35 million so the rebuilding could begin right away. Crews sifted through the rubble layer by layer, treating the palace like an archaeological site in hopes that some items had survived the fire. Crews found a shard of a French vase gifted to Emperor Dom Pedro II, and, miraculously, the skull of Luzia, the oldest human...