UC Exploratório

The rule is reversed here

Everywhere else on this visit, the signs say don't touch. Cross the river to the Exploratório and the rule flips. Opened in 1995 as Portugal's first interactive science centre, it was built on a simple bet: that a child who pulls the lever, spins the disc and launches the ball learns more physics in an afternoon than in a week of being told to sit still. Thirty years on, the bet keeps paying.

Hands first, questions after

The halls are full of machines that only work if you work them — exhibits on light, motion, sound and the body that are really experiments wearing friendly faces. At the centre sits the planetarium, its 360° projection wrapping the whole dome in sky, deep sea or the inside of a cell. The Exploratório is designed for children and families, but watch the adults: within ten minutes they have stopped supervising and started competing.

Your two hours

Plan on a good two hours, and don't be surprised if the children vote to stay longer. The building is fully accessible, there is space to move, and nobody will shush anyone. It pairs beautifully with the Science Museum uptown: eighteenth-century instruments in the morning, your own experiments in the afternoon. When you're there, stand in the planetarium as the lights go down. The dome dissolves, the floor seems to tilt, a hundred small voices gasp at once — and for a few seconds the room is exactly what the university has been making for seven hundred years: people looking up, wanting to know.