Rio de Janeiro - Quinta da Boa Vista

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.

Within the Quinta da Boa Vista park are the Fauna Museum, with specimens of Brazilian birds and mammals, and the Zoo, one of the finest in Brazil, with some 2400 species of mammals, birds and reptiles from Africa, Asia and Brazil.