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

S.L. Benfica Sport Lisboa e 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'', Be ...

. Named after

Cosme Damião Cosme Damião (2 November 1885 – 12 June 1947) was a Portuguese football player-coach for S.L. Benfica. He is remembered as the main force behind the birth of Benfica and one of the first great Portuguese football players. Benfica's yearly aw ...

, 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 33rd president of sports club S.L. Benfica, from October 2003 to July 2021. He was also president of the club's SAD board of directors until ...

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 footballer who played as a striker. He is considered one of the greatest players o ...

, 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 triangular elements of the dome are structurally rigid and distribute the structural stress throughout the structure, making geodesic d ...

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

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most vis ...

{{S.L. Benfica

Museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

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