Museu Industrial e Artesanal do Têxtil

The MIAT Museum in Mira de Aire preserves the legacy of Portugal’s 20th-century textile industry, featuring exhibits on wool processing, carpet manufacturing, and textile machinery.

Planning your visit

MIAT preserves the machinery and skills of Portugal's twentieth-century textile industry in Mira de Aire, a town in the limestone hills of the Serra de Aire whose economy was built on wool.

The collection covers the full sequence: wool washing, carding, spinning, weaving and finishing, with working machinery from successive periods, alongside carpet manufacture, tailoring and the hand crafts that preceded mechanisation. Demonstrations show processes that are otherwise entirely invisible in finished cloth.

Portugal's textile sector was a major employer through the twentieth century and has contracted sharply under global competition, which gives the museum's subject a recent and locally felt edge.

Mira de Aire is better known for its caves — among the largest show caves in Portugal, with an underground route through chambers and lakes — and the two are naturally combined. The Fátima sanctuary and the monasteries of Batalha and Alcobaça are within reach.

Allow an hour. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is shown below.