Manuel Coelho Baptista de Lima Military History Center

The NHMMCBL, housed in the former Boa Nova Military Hospital, is home to the MAH’s Military and Armaments Management Unit and Uniforms Management Unit, and is the only Portuguese museum not part of the Ministry of Defense dedicated to this subject.

This collection is brought to the public through three long-term thematic exhibitions which, alongside an explanation of the evolution and functionality of weapons and an invitation to reflect on the major ethical, moral and social issues inherent in war conflicts, document the personality and personal experiences of the patron Manuel Coelho Baptista de Lima and the history of the building itself.

Long-term exhibitions

Men, Weapons and War – From the Arrow to the Drone

The exhibition looks at the evolution of weapons in conjunction with the history of mankind, and is organized into five thematic sections, arranged diachronically, making it possible to create the illusion of a journey through time and space to the battlefields and their surrounding context. Its collection consists of firearms and weapons, sphragistics, graphic and fine arts documents, uniforms and body armor, musical instruments, artillery pieces and support material, transport and logistics.

Memory and Novelty: Manuel Coelho Baptista de Lima and the Azorean Heritage

This exhibition aims to illustrate the career of the Angrense intellectual Baptista de Lima (1920-1996), highlighting his intention to build an Azorean identity discourse and memory that was at odds with the ethnographic regionalism of the first half of the 20th century, and highlighting his contribution to the use, in the archipelago, of new European models of heritage management and defense, which would mark the genesis of regional public action in this area.

Royal Hospital of Boa Nova

Under this title, the memories of the use of the building are gathered, which was, as far as is known, one of the oldest military hospitals in the world.

With its first roots in the field hospital brought by D. Álvaro de Bazan when he conquered Terceira Island in 1583, the Filipino building developed in line with the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Boa Nova and grew, in the time of D. José I, with a large new infirmary.
The ways of seeing illness and health, in their relationship with the sacred and with archaic remedies and treatments, as well as the memories of what happened in this centuries-old building, are revisited in panels and pieces, in the old chapel and attached sacristy, recalling the signing of the Spanish surrender in 1642, after a memorable eleven-month siege, maintained by the population and militias of Terceira Island, with the help of those from other Azorean islands; the preaching of António Vieira in 1654; the figure of Terceira’s greatest chronicler, Manuel Luís Maldonado (1644-1711), author of the Fenix Angrence and administrator of the hospital, who is buried here; and the installation, for a time, of the English printing press with which the press was inaugurated in the Azores.