World of Discoveries (Museu Interativo)

Porto was the city that launched the Age of Discovery — Henry the Navigator was born here, the caravels that reached India and Brazil were funded by Porto merchants, and the city's residents donated their best meat to provision the fleets (keeping only tripe for themselves, which is why they're still called tripeiros). This interactive museum tells that story with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you understand why a small country at the edge of Europe decided to sail to the other side of the world.

The museum is structured as a journey — you literally board a small boat that drifts through recreated scenes of the Portuguese maritime expansion, from the African coast to India to Japan to Brazil. It's family-friendly and slightly theme-park-ish, but the historical content is solid, and the section on the spice trade — explaining how the desire for pepper, cinnamon, and cloves drove an entire civilization to cross oceans — puts everything in a context that dry history books often miss.

The museum sits in the Miragaia neighbourhood, one of Porto's oldest quarters, on the riverfront between the Ribeira and Foz. The building itself — a former customs warehouse — has the kind of thick stone walls and vaulted ceilings that remind you this waterfront has been moving cargo since the Middle Ages.