Câmara Cascudo Museum

About this place

The Câmara Cascudo Museum is a university museum of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in the Tirol district of Natal, the largest museum in the state and one of the most important university museums in Brazil. It goes back to 1960, when the Institute of Anthropology was set up as the young university's first research centre, on the initiative of its rector and intellectuals including Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Brazil's best-known folklorist and the institute's first director. The institute carried out pioneering research in palaeontology, geology, botany, zoology, anthropology, archaeology and linguistics, in partnership with the Emílio Goeldi Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, and in 1973 it became a museum. Its building, whose large pavilion opened in 1969, is an example of modernist architecture in the state. The collections exceed two hundred thousand items in four sections: archaeology, documentation and memory, ethnology and palaeontology, including flaked and polished stone tools of peoples who lived in the region long ago, fossils from the Potiguar Basin and a shell collection. Check opening times on the museum's website before going.