This place is an interesting amalgam. Part art museum, part art foundation, part sculpture garden, part botanical garden, part living farm/museum. We went for the contemporary art. I love traditional art as well as industrial design, and also old estates you can tour as if frozen in time. But here in Porto, many of the museums or museum-adjacent sites (think church related entities) I found seemed to have a slant towards baroque and religious art. We had a solid dose of that in Valencia two years ago. A little bit of that goes a long way and apparently lasts a while. Aside from peeking into churches here to admire the ornamentation, going into a museum to see lots of dark portraits and religious iconography wasn’t a draw.
We very much enjoyed the entire Serralves experience, inside and out. It sits on 18 hectares which is almost 45 acres. It is big. After wandering inside the museum, we wandered out to the “park”. A very nice meander. The juxtaposition here starkly highlighted by very contemporary art at one end, a deco villa in the middle (fronted by quite a sculpture) with manicured gardens and fountains, and literally at the other, end at the bottom of the hill, chickens and pigs. It left me curious to read up on the benefactor of all this, which I will do.
