Colonia del Sacramento Museums Guide: Museo Portugués, Casa de Nacarello & Museo del Azulejo

Scattered within three blocks of Plaza Mayor 25 de Mayo are the historic houses of the Sistema de Museos de Colonia del Sacramento. Rather than charging separate entry fees at each doorway, the municipality sells a single combined museum pass (Bono de Museos) at the ticket desk of the Museo Municipal Dr. Bautista Rebuffo on Plaza Mayor (check the official Intendencia de Colonia portal for current daily opening schedules and which rotating houses are open on the day of your visit).

1. The Portuguese Houses on Plaza Mayor: Museo Portugués & Casa de Nacarello

• Museo Portugués (Plaza Mayor 25 de Mayo): Housed inside a circa-1720 Portuguese family residence expanded in the nineteenth century, the museum preserves original heavy timber ceilings, stone floors, and iron window grilles. Its rooms bring the 1680-to-1777 Luso-Spanish struggle to life through replica uniforms of the Portuguese Dragões regiments, naval navigation instruments, 17th-century cartography, Portuguese coat-of-arms stone carvings, and period Indo-Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian dark hardwood furniture.
• Casa de Nacarello (Directly Next Door on Plaza Mayor): Built around 1750 with a classic four-sloped Portuguese tiled roof and original stone floors, this intimate single-storey home recreates the everyday domestic rooms, dining table, prayer niche, and hearth kitchen of an eighteenth-century Portuguese military officer's family.
• Museo Municipal Dr. Bautista Rebuffo (Casa del Almirante Brown): Occupying the two-storey house where Irish-born Argentine naval hero Admiral William Brown stayed in 1826, the main municipal museum displays giant prehistoric Pleistocene megafauna fossils (Glyptodon shells) found in Colonia Department alongside colonial iron cannons, archival documents, and indigenous Charrúa stone bolas.

2. Museo del Azulejo (1750 Tile Museum)

Tucked inside the smallest surviving circa-1750 Portuguese stone cottage near the riverfront on Calle Misiones de los Tapes, this gem showcases three centuries of decorative glazed ceramic tiles (azulejos), from 19th-century French Pas-de-Calais (Desvres) and Catalan designs to the earliest Uruguayan tiles fired in Montevideo in the 1860s.

3. Museo Español (Calle España & San José)

Set in a two-storey 18th-century northern-Spanish-style house, the Museo Español exhibits Spanish colonial ceramics, silverware, and Córdoba leatherwork.

4. Practical Combined Ticket Tips

Your single museum pass covers all open municipal houses on the same day, allowing you to stroll between Plaza Mayor and the riverfront at your own pace.

5. Archivo Histórico Regional (Casa de Lavalleja)

Right off Calle Misiones de los Tapes, admire the exterior of the 18th-century Portuguese stone house that preserves Colonia's regional historical archives.