USP Geosciences Museum, São Paulo

About this place

The Geosciences Museum of the University of São Paulo's Institute of Geosciences sits inside the University City in the Butantã district. It holds one of Brazil's most important collections of minerals and rocks and is open to the public. It grew out of an old mineralogy museum founded by Professor Ettore Onorato in 1935, which began with the purchase of a mining engineer's private collection and grew with further collections and finds made by staff and students on field trips. For decades it was used only by teachers and researchers, until it opened to the public in 1991 in a 550-square-metre hall; it was renovated and reopened in 2000. The collection has about fifteen thousand pieces, some 1,500 of them on permanent display: minerals, ores, gems, rocks, cave formations and meteorites, including the Itapuranga meteorite, counted as the fifth largest in Brazil, as well as important fossils. School groups are welcomed on tours led by geology students.