Museu Casa de Benjamin Constant, Historical residence museum in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Museu Casa de Benjamin Constant is a preserved 19th-century residence situated on a hillside in Santa Teresa. From this location, you can see across Guanabara Bay toward downtown Rio de Janeiro.

Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, a mathematics professor, engineer and military officer, died in this house on 22 January 1891. The provisional republican government bought the property that year for 100 contos de réis from Antônio Moreira dos Santos Costa, as Article 8 of the 1891 Constitution required, and left it to his widow Maria Joaquina and their children. The house opened as a museum on 18 October 1982.

The house is named after a mathematics professor and displays furnishings, artwork, and clothing from the 1800s and 1900s. Visitors get a sense of daily life during the imperial and republican periods.

The house is located in Santa Teresa, and you should know that access involves steep streets in the neighborhood. Comfortable walking shoes are useful because the area has hilly terrain.

The museum's opening date, 18 October, marks an episode in the patron's life: in 1849, aged 12, Benjamin Constant jumped into a river in Magé after his father's death and was rescued by an enslaved washerwoman. He later treated that day as his symbolic birthday.