Rio de Janeiro - National Museum

From 1808 to 1889 the palace of Quinta da Boa Vista was the residence of the royal and the imperial family, and was much altered and rebuilt to become the Palácio de São Cristóvão. It now houses the National Museum, which has the largest zoological, botanical, ethnological and archaeological collections in the country, amounting in total to over a million items, as well as a library of 300,000 volumes. The Museum also runs postgraduate training courses.