Museo del Carnaval, Montevideo: Hours, Tickets and the Friday Guided Visit

Hours and Closed Days

The address is Rambla 25 de Agosto de 1825 no. 218, corner Maciel, in Ciudad Vieja, and the phone is (+598) 2916 5493. Doors open Wednesday to Sunday 11:00-17:00. The museum closes on 1 and 6 January, 1 May, 18 July, 25 August, and 24, 25 and 31 December.

Monday and Tuesday it is shut all day, which surprises visitors who assume capital-city museums open daily. Cruise passengers docking on a Monday or Tuesday will need another plan, or another day. Reaching it is easy: the museum says every bus bound for Ciudad Vieja or Aduana takes you there, and so does the Bus Turístico.

For orientation across the whole city, our Montevideo map helps.

Tickets and the Friday Guided Visit

The general ticket is $4.96 (UYU 200). Students and residents over 65 pay $3.72 (UYU 150), holders of the Tarjeta Dorada pay $2.48 (UYU 100), and the Tarjeta Verde and children under 12 enter free. Cards are accepted, including Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, Oca, Cabal and Amex, so you do not need a pocket of pesos.

The reason to come on a Friday: at 11:30 a guided visit departs and it is included in your general ticket, no extra charge. For pre-arranged groups, a standard guided visit lasts about 30 minutes, and a 'visita participativa' adds a candombe or murga demonstration workshop for a total of about an hour. Groups need a minimum of 10 people, and visits run in Spanish, Portuguese, English or French.

Write to contacto@museodelcarnaval.org to arrange one.

Access

The exhibition rooms and the workshop space sit on the ground floor, reached by ramps, and there is an accessible toilet. General visitors enter at Rambla 25 de Agosto 218. Groups with reduced mobility can use the gate on Maciel street instead, which avoids the main approach.

The documentation centre is on the second floor, so travellers who cannot manage stairs should ask staff what can be shown downstairs. Anyone planning a longer accessible itinerary can find more practical notes in our Montevideo travel tips.

Costumes, Drums and Masks

The exhibition rooms on the ground floor show the costumes, masks and drums of Uruguayan carnival, the same pieces the groups wear and play on the summer stages. The people who show you round are part of the story: the museum says its hosts are artists and musicians with long careers, many of them carnival performers themselves, so the history comes with first-hand experience. The drums belong to the comparsas and the candombe tradition, which you can hear in the street in Barrio Sur and Palermo.

The museum shop, open Wednesday to Sunday 11:00-17:00 like the museum, sells national crafts by artisans and artists, reproductions, books, records and souvenirs, a better bet than a fridge magnet if you want something made in Uruguay.

The Five Categories of Carnival

Uruguayan carnival groups compete in five categories: murgas, humoristas, parodistas, revistas and comparsas de negros y lubolos. The comparsas carry the candombe drums, and the museum describes their street parade as an expression of identity and resistance of Uruguay's Black community. All five perform on open-air neighbourhood stages called tablados and compete in the Concurso Oficial de Agrupaciones Carnavalescas at the Teatro de Verano Ramón Collazo, in Parque Rodó.

The contest runs about forty consecutive nights, from the last days of January to early March. The Desfile de Llamadas, the great drum parade through Barrio Sur and Palermo, was made official in 1956. Our carnival in Uruguay guide explains the whole calendar.

The Archive Upstairs

The second floor holds the museum's documentation centre, where the documents of the festival are kept and studied. It matters more than it sounds: the museum reopened on 30 September 2022 after a year of works that added new workshop spaces, an artisans' shop and a café, and put a new roof over the archive to protect it. The documentation project has won outside recognition, including support through Iberarchivos and the Reina Sofía prize for heritage conservation in 2009.

The café added in those works is a place to wait if you arrive early for the Friday 11:30 visit.

The plot has a longer story than the museum. When Montevideo was founded, a third of it lay under the water of the bay. The old colonial city wall crossed this ground, and remains of it lie underground near the wall line on Piedras street.

The buildings were port warehouses, including the barraca of the shipping firm Wilson Sons & Co.. Today the plot covers 3,076 square metres and completes the block it shares with the Mercado del Puerto, the covered market hall of the port. Since January 2008 the museum has been run as a trust of the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Tourism and the Intendencia de Montevideo.

The Tablado del Museo

Since 2010 the Plaza del Carnaval inside the museum has hosted the museum's own summer tablado, an open-air stage where real carnival groups perform. The plaza covers 1,000 square metres and opened in February 2010 on the corner of Piedras and Maciel, so it is part of the museum complex rather than a separate venue. You enter through the museum, which means your warm-up is the exhibition itself, a sensible order for anyone seeing carnival groups for the first time.

There is a second covered stage, so if summer rain arrives the show goes on instead of being cancelled. Tablado tickets are sold separately each season, so ask at the desk or email before you go. Performances run during Carnaval, from late January to early March.

Seats for the Parades

The museum sells tourist palco seats, grandstand places with hosts, toilets and security, for the big parades of the season. Three are on offer: the Desfile Inaugural in Plaza Cagancha, which runs about 6 hours, the samba schools parade at about 3.5 hours, and the Desfile de Llamadas, the drum parade through Barrio Sur and Palermo. Buying a palco seat means you sit rather than stand for hours on the pavement, which on a hot summer night matters more than you expect.

To arrange seats, write to contacto@museodelcarnaval.org well ahead. The parades fall in late January and February each year. The months, routes and the meaning of each parade are on our carnival in Uruguay page, and the drum tradition itself has its own story on candombe.

The museum's own guided visit runs about 30 minutes. The participatory visit, with a candombe or murga demonstration added, takes about an hour. For a self-guided look, our estimate is under an hour for the two exhibition floors, longer if you read every label or spend time in the documentation centre.

Plan the practical side around the rule that the museum opens Wednesday to Sunday 11:00-17:00 only. If you want the included guided visit, come Friday and be at the desk before 11:30, then walk straight into lunch next door. That sequence fills the morning without rushing.

If you still have energy afterwards, the rest of Ciudad Vieja is on your doorstep and can absorb a full afternoon of squares, gates and street art.

- A third of the museum's plot was under the bay when Montevideo was founded, before the shoreline was filled in. (Museo del Carnaval) - Remains of the old colonial city wall lie underground on the plot, near the wall line on Piedras street. (Museo del Carnaval) - The building was a warehouse of the shipping firm Wilson Sons & Co., and the museum shares the whole block with the Mercado del Puerto.

(Museo del Carnaval) - The museum won the Reina Sofía prize for heritage conservation in 2009 for its archive work, and reopened after renovations on 30 September 2022. (Museo del Carnaval) (Ministry of Education and Culture) - The museum's Friday guided visit is included in the ordinary ticket, so arriving at 11:30 on a Friday costs you nothing extra. (Museo del Carnaval)

The cleanest plan is a Friday. Arrive before 11:30 for the guided visit included in the general ticket, then step next door for grill lunch at the Mercado del Puerto after the tour. At 14:30, Monday to Saturday, the Ciudad Vieja historical walking tour departs and takes in the old city including the market, so the afternoon fills itself.

In the evening, the El Milongón dinner show puts candombe, tango and folklore on stage with dinner, and our candombe page explains where the drums play in the street. If you prefer to explore alone, our Ciudad Vieja guide and the wider list of Montevideo attractions cover the squares and gates nearby, and where to stay in Montevideo helps if you want to sleep in the old town.