Portugal dos Pequenitos

Portugal dos Pequenitos can translate as "Portugal of the Little Ones" or "Portugal for the Little Ones". Either one would be appropriate for this Portugal in miniature which will particularly appeal to younger visitors. Founded by Professor Bissaya Barreto, a local doctor and lecturer at the medical school, his goal for the park was to be "a living portrait of what it is to be Portuguese and the Portuguese presence throughout the world". The result is both entertaining and educational with a range of scaled-down versions of Portugal's finest national buildings, traditional regional villages and references to the rest of the Portuguese speaking world.

One can get a feeling of what it was like for Gulliver amongst the child-sized villages. Unlike other model villages you may have visited these replicas are big enough for children to enter and explore.

Architectural highlights can be found in the form of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belem, the Convento de Cristo in Tomar, the Tower of Belém in Lisbon and Coimbra University, to name a few. These national monuments tend to be edited highlights rather than the whole building as, frankly, this would have been something of a tall order for the modernist architect Cassiano Branco who constructed the park.

As well as various temples and pagodas representing the ex colonies in Africa, Macau, India and Timor there are the costume, naval and furniture museums, which maintain the miniature theme.