Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Great Loss.

The National Museum is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution in Rio de Janeiro.

It was founded on June, 6, 1818 by King João VI of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves under the name of “Royal Museum” (initially housed at the Campo de Santana park).
In the 19th century, the institution was already established as the most important South American museum of its type.

The National Museum held a vast collection with more than 20 million objects, one of the largest collections of natural history and anthropological artifacts in the world.

The collection was subdivided into seven main nuclei: geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, biological anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology.

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday, September 2, 2018 (about 19:30 local time (23:30 UTC) and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable.

The National Museum facade, in the middle of the park Quinta da Boa Vista.

Brazil’s president, Michel Temer declared:“Today is a tragic day for the museology of our country. Two hundred years of work research and knowledge were lost.”

The building with numerous historical artifacts and cultural relics went up on flames on September, 2 and the fire was out of control by September, 3 (21:00 local, 00:00 UTC).

A building area of 13600 m² with 122 rooms were destroyed.
The protesters’ signs outside the museum read:“200 years of history, 20 million items reduced to ashes.”

Some items survived the fire. The Bendego meteorite from the collection of meteorites, which is the biggest iron meteorite ever found in Brazil, was unscathed. At least three other meteorites also survived undamaged.
Firefighters recovered several portraits from the upper floor which had been damaged but not destroyed.
Zoology department managed to pull out mollusks and other marine specimens.
Also the skull of a famous Luzia Woman was recovered.

After more than 4 months not much has been done (except private and big foreign companies’ donations plus 1 million euro from German Foreign Ministry and help from UNESCO).

All the domestic economic support networks have got stuck in state bureaucracy.