Closed for six years, the museum that is all about sugar now reopens.
Praça Colombo has returned to being one of the sweetest places in town. The ‘A Cidade do Açúcar’ (city of sugar) museum has reopened its doors to the public. Its location is the same but the space has been remodelled due to the damage it sustained in the floods of February 20th 2010.
Six years later and with most of the pieces restored, what makes this reopening a hot topic is the museum’s new collections, one from the Jesuits’ College of Funchal and one from the diggings of the Chapel of the D. Mécia Manor. The museum has a wide array of pieces in display such as the well from where primitive sugar-making tools such as the sugar loaf moulds were retrieved.
The museum was first inaugurated in 1996. Its purpose was to divulge the history of the sugar industry of Madeira between the 15th and 19th centuries.
The building where it is housed was once the residence of João Esmeraldo, a Flemish merchant who came to Madeira in the 15th century to deal in the trade of its sugar with the rest of Europe.
The archaeological findings that form the museum’s collection were discovered when the buildings in the area were being restored and Praça Colombo was opened in 1989.
