National Museum of Brazil

This guide to Brazil's National Museum in Rio starts with two fire hydrants outside the building that produced no water when firefighters needed them, during the fire that tore through this nineteenth-century palace on September 2, 2018. It traces the museum's earlier life as a merchant's country house built around 1803, gifted to the Portuguese prince regent and later opened as the National Museum in 1892, plus the budget cuts that left it unprotected in the years before the fire. The museum's own director later spoke about that shortfall with unusual bluntness.