It was a great experience to see so many puppets from all over the world and even to try to manipulate them :) It is a part of history and i’m thankful to the museum for giving a chance to touch it. I wish the puppet show performing on the stage would be translated or given a script in English. It seemed was very funny - children were glad to participate and adults who understood in portuguese always laughed.

We went at 10am on a Sunday when entrance was free (until 2pm). We didn't see anyone else visiting. It only took 20 minutes or so for the small museum. The first set of rooms display puppets from around the world, starting with Indonesia.

It was nice that their were puppets to try yourself, including glove puppets.

We came away with a smile.

If you are in the area with kids, or even without, this would make for a pleasant, stimulating interlude. It is a small museum laid out on a single trail, so you have to backtrack to exit, but this only serves to reinforce the particular things you have seen. The puppets come from very specific areas, with interesting individual differences. The signage in English is good, and the variety is wide—I saw puppets I was never aware of before, such as the Vietnamese water puppets, or others I had only heard about, such as the Punch and Judy puppets. The kids enjoyed the museum, even though they may consider themselves too old or sophisticated to play with puppets (there was a section on animation which seemed closer to their experiences), and even the adults who don't normally go to museums said that they enjoyed it as well, finding it refreshing to see home grown, non-commercialized amusement. I was sorry that it was only after we had been in Lisbon for a few days that we realized that we were so close to the food court, Mercado do Riberira, which we read about but missed.