Brazil Lost 80 Percent of Its National Museum Collection in One Night. Here’s How It’s Fighting to Rebuild

The news arrived with both excitement and a pang of grief: The oldest national history museum in the Americas was slated to partially reopen for the first time since a 2018 fire destroyed more than 16 million objects—80 percent of its collections. “We put out tickets; it sold out in hours,” says Ronaldo Fernandes, director of the 208-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

Before the fire, some 300,000 Brazilian schoolchildren visited the museum each year. My partner had been one of them, so I got us free tickets to the temporary exhibition in September 2025. The building, Paço São Cristóvão, was a former residence of Portuguese and Brazilian monarchs, and it was as regal as she remembered it. We found that the yellow-and-white facade had been restored, along with 30 statues of Greek gods that adorned the roofline. Inside, the Bendegó meteorite, a 11,820-pound space rock found in Brazil in 1784, had survived the flames and was still on display in the entry room.

But noticeable changes were everywhere. Some walls remained blackened from the flames. Steel support beams were still twisted and exposed. On the positive side of the experience, we saw new acquisitions, including a 51-and-a-half-foot-long sperm whale skeleton that hung from a fresh 138-glass-panel skylight. I left wanting more—but I would have to wait. The museum is still rebuilding its spaces and collections, targeting a 2029 reopening date.

The fire on September 2, 2018, began with an electrical issue, but it spiraled out of control when the hydrants next to the building proved to be dry. According to a 160-page report by Alexander Kellner, the museum’s director at the time, the museum had been chronically underfunded for years, and a whistleblower had warned of fire risk as early as 2004.

“The week before the fire, we had a discussion with a fire prevention specialist,” says Fernandes, who was assistant director during the fire and took over the leading role earlier this year. New maintenance funding had recently arrived, in honor of the museum’s 200th anniversary, but the blaze happened before the prevention work could begin.

The morning after the fire, hundreds of people gathered outside the museum’s gates to see the extent of the damage. When some tried to jump the fence, the police responded with tear gas and pepper spray. The outer walls, which had been solidly built by enslaved Africans, remained intact. But historian Regina Dantas remembers entering her third-floor office and seeing that everything inside had been incinerated. “I cried profusely,” says Dantas. “I lost everything—I didn’t have a pen.”

Items stored in nearby buildings were safe from the blaze: Torah scrolls from the 13th or 14th century, the vertebrate and herbarium collections and a 500,000-volume library. Some researchers dashed into the main building during the fire’s early stages and saved precious specimens that had been used to define entire species. But the losses included Egyptian mummies, a royal Hawaiian feather cloak gifted to Brazil’s last regent, audio recordings of Indigenous languages no longer spoken and the museum’s entire insect collection.

A nonprofit called Projeto Museu Nacional Vive—or The National Museum Is Alive—is raising funds for the museum’s reopening, with backing from UNESCO, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Vale Cultural Institute. But the project is still about $29 million short. Funding isn’t coming as easily as it did for Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral, which drew pledges totaling nearly $1 billion in the first two days after its 2019 fire. Some of the largest donations came from the families that owned luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent. “In France, the culture of donating money for the reconstruction of buildings and storage of historical heritage is much different from here,” says Larissa Graça, the technical manager of the fundraising nonprofit.

Brazil’s Ministry of Education provided about $2.35 million so the rebuilding could begin right away. Crews sifted through the rubble layer by layer, treating the palace like an archaeological site in hopes that some items had survived the fire. Crews found a shard of a French vase gifted to Emperor Dom Pedro II, and, miraculously, the skull of Luzia, the oldest human remains discovered in the Americas. About 5,000 artifacts recovered from the wreckage are being restored by archaeologists, a process that could take decades. “You and I will not see them finished,” says Fernandes.

When cleanup crews reached the final layer of rubble, they encountered a surprise: the foundations of a chapel built in 1840 and destroyed in 1910. “We knew all the time there was a chapel there … and now we found it,” says Fernandes. The fire also uncovered bricks from earlier periods, as well as layers of wallpaper not seen since the exile of Brazil’s last monarch, in 1889.

“Of course, the fire was a tragedy, but because of the fire, we are discovering a lot more about the history of this building and the people who made it than we knew before,” says Graça, who has worked on several museum projects in Brazil, including São Paulo’s Portuguese Language Museum, which was damaged by a fire in 2015.

The reopened museum will showcase the chapel ruins and exposed bricks. The museum also plans to maintain some charred walls and exposed beams to commemorate the tragedy. “The fire is now an important part of the history of this building, so we have to preserve it this way,” says Fernandes.

All the while, new artifacts are coming in—more than 16,700 to date. Burkhard Pohl, a Swiss-German collector who maintains one of the world’s largest fossil collections, donated 1,105 fossils from the Araripe Basin, in northern Brazil, that date back 115 million years. The National Museum of Denmark has also returned a Tupinambá feather cloak taken from Brazil in 1689. “The mantle is considered an ancestor,” says Fernandes. “It’s an important piece of Brazilian history, and I’m very glad that we got it.”

But the museum doesn’t simply want to redo its collections as they were. Like many 19th-century institutions, it featured numerous stolen artifacts and neglected to consult the Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans whose cultures help make up the country’s history. “We have been, during this process, doing a lot of reflection, a lot of discussion, on how to make this museum less colonial, and how to bring people to think and to create the new museum together,” says Graça.

Curators are using the rebuilding as an opportunity to engage with Indigenous leaders and Afro-Brazilian quilombo (communities of formerly enslaved people) leaders about how they could be better represented in future exhibits and are posting those discussions to YouTube. The museum’s representatives are traveling the country to solicit direct donations. “We’re going to the tribes and the regional people and asking: ‘Do you want to be represented in the National Museum? And if you say yes, how do you want to be represented there?’”

One of the challenges will be how to incorporate the stories of those who built the palace, says Graça. “The official history we have there is white, and we know that all the construction of this building was made by Black people, so how can we integrate the history, the narrative, the importance of these people that were not considered in history?”

As the renovations continue, the museum will offer two new exhibits in 2026, one in June to coincide with the 208th anniversary of its founding and another in September to commemorate the fire’s eighth anniversary. “It’s very important to keep the museum in the imagination of people,” says Fernandes.

Graça hopes the restored National Museum will inspire many new generations of Brazilian schoolchildren. “If they can understand our history,” she says, “we can think about our possible futures.”