Lisbon, Feb. 19 2025 (Lusa) - Lisbon's National Archaeological Museum (MNA) has launched an international public tender for a €13.4-million contract to overhaul the institution, to be funded under Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) for spending European Union post-pandemic funds, its director revealed on Wednesday.
The tender, which was launched on Tuesday, is the first phase of a contract to completely overhaul the museum, with work due to start in the summer and take around 10 months, the MNA director, António Carvalho, told Lusa.
"If there are proposals that respect the terms of the tender, it is foreseeable that the work will begin during the second quarter of the year," he said, pointing out that interested companies will have until 22 March to apply.
The exact amount available for this contract, under the RRP, is €13,492,887.77, according to the public tender, with the Lisbon Tourism Association (ATL) formally overseeing the work, which should be fully completed by 31 March 2026, the deadline for the RRP.
Carvalho recalled that, according to the contract to be signed with the company that wins the tender, any property with historical, palaeontological, archaeological, architectural, linguistic, documentary, artistic, ethnographic, scientific, social, industrial or technical value found during the course of the work will have to be handed over by the contractor to the responsible authorities.
Also as part of the RRP-funded works, on 1 February the excavations began inside that are obligatory by law, and which "continue at a good pace" according to the director of what is sometimes known as the country's "museum of the territories" - which has been in existence for 130 years and has around 7,000 pieces in its inventory, many of them classified as national treasures.
Another phase of the works programme includes conservation work on the south, north and west façades of the MNA building, which takes up most of the façade of the Jerónimos Monastery in the Lisbon neighbourhood of Belém, facing the Praça do Império square.
The MNA has been closed to the general public since April 2022, but has continued to host organised visits by groups from universities and schools, associations and organisations, with which it wanted to maintain contact.
At the same time, it has continued to loan pieces out for exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, co-producting shows as "Energies. Perpetual Movement" at the nearby Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), and "Idols. Millennial Views" at the Archaeological Museum of Alicante, in Spain.
"The RRP is a unique opportunity, and this type of intervention is rare in Portugal," Carvalho told Lusa in January about the project, which in the last reprogramming of the plan, in March 2024, allocated a total of €32,692,636.60 to the MNA (initially €24.5 million had been allocated).
AG/ARO // ARO.
Lusa
