The Museu Benfica – Cosme Damião is the museum of Portuguese sports club

S.L. Benfica (), commonly known as Benfica, is a professional football club based in Lisbon, Portugal, that competes in the Primeira Liga, the top flight of Portuguese football. Founded on 28 February 1904, as ''Sport Lisboa'', Benfica is one of the " ...

. Named after

Cosme Damião Cosme Damião (2 November 1885 – 12 June 1947) was a Portuguese football player-coach for S.L. Benfica. A former midfielder, he is remembered as the main force behind the birth of Benfica and one of the first great Portuguese football players ...

, one of the club's founders in 1904, the museum was inaugurated on 26 July 2013 under the presidency of

Luís Filipe Vieira Luís Filipe Ferreira Vieira (born 22 June 1949) is a Portuguese real estate businessman who was the List of S.L. Benfica presidents, 33rd president of sports club S.L. Benfica, from October 2003 to July 2021. He was also president of the club ...

and opened to the public on 29 July, one year and three months after the start of construction. Located near Benfica's stadium, the building occupies 4,000 square metres and is composed of three floors, which are accompanied by a huge vertical parallelepiped made of glass exhibiting roughly 500 trophies won by the club. The museum is split into 29 thematic areas containing around 1,000 pieces from a collection of 30,000, including trophies, documents, images, audio and video related to the history of Benfica, contextualised into domestic and international historic events of the 20th century. Moreover, the museum includes audiovisual touchscreens, a hologram of

Eusébio Eusébio da Silva Ferreira (; 25 January 1942 – 5 January 2014), nicknamed the "Black Panther", the "Black Pearl" or "O Rei" ("The King"), was a Portuguese Association football, footballer who played as a Forward (association football)#Stri ...

, an area displaying photos of Benfica supporters and, lastly, an elevator surrounded by video walls showing messages and images of ''benfiquistas''. This area transports visitors to a

geodesic dome A geodesic dome is a hemispherical thin-shell structure (lattice-shell) based on a geodesic polyhedron. The rigid triangular elements of the dome distribute stress throughout the structure, making geodesic domes able to withstand very heavy ...

on the top of building, where a short film about the club's history is displayed. On 12 December 2014, the Museu Benfica was awarded the prize for Best Portuguese Museum of 2014 by the Portuguese Association of Museology. , the museum has had 400,000 visitors.

References

External links

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Making of Museu Cosme Damião
on

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{{S.L. Benfica

Museum A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying or Preservation (library and archive), preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects. Many museums have exhibitions of these objects on public display, and some have private colle ...

Association football museums and halls of fame Sports museums in Portugal Sport in Lisbon Museums in Lisbon Museums established in 2013 2013 establishments in Portugal