An 1850 mansion on Rua São Clemente, Brazil's first public house-museum.
Landmark buildingThe pink mansion at Rua São Clemente 134 is one of the oldest surviving houses in Botafogo, built in 1849–1850 for the Baron of Lagoa. It is a single grand residence set back from the street behind iron gates, with around 9,000 m² of public gardens behind it — one of the few places in the neighborhood where you can walk through what a 19th-century Botafogo estate actually looked like.
Today it operates as the Museu Casa de Rui Barbosa, run by a federal foundation, with the jurist's library, archive and household intact. For anyone weighing an apartment nearby, the practical point is the garden: it functions as a quiet public park in the middle of one of Botafogo's busiest corridors, two blocks from the metro.
Address: Rua São Clemente 134, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro
The house passed through private hands until Rui Barbosa — jurist, senator, and a central figure in Brazil's First Republic — bought it and lived there from 1895 until his death in 1923. The federal government acquired the property in 1924 and opened it as a museum in 1930, making it the first public house-museum in Brazil.
In 1966 the institution became the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, a federal cultural foundation that still maintains the house, the archive and the historic garden. The property is also registered as a national archaeological site.
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