Museu Carlos Costa Pinto, Salvador

The Carlos Costa Pinto Museum is located on Sete de Setembro Avenue in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. It is a foundation, a private cultural institution maintained through an agreement with the Bahia State Government.

The house where the museum is installed, designed by architects Euvaldo Reis and Diógenes Rebouças, in American Colonial style, dates from 1958. Initially intended as the family's residence, it was never lived in. It has undergone adaptations to accommodate its new function and house a collection of 3,175 pieces.

It was inaugurated on November 5, 1969, thanks to the support of the then governor of the State of Bahia, Dr. Luís Viana Filho. Later, governor Antônio Carlos Magalhães completed it with the library and auditorium facilities.

The collection was donated by his widow Margarida Ballalai de Carvalho Costa Pinto, daughter of João Pereira de Carvalho and Helena Ballalai de Carvalho, a traditional Bahia family. She married Carlos Aguiar da Costa Pinto when she was 17. They had no children. To fulfill the dream of her husband, a wealthy businessman who cultivated the habit of collecting art pieces and was largely responsible for the collection that reconstitutes the daily life of the old families of the sugar aristocracy in Bahia between the 17th and 19th centuries.

The museum portrays the opulence of the Bahian aristocracy, represented mainly in the collection of jewelry made of gold and precious stones. The silverware makes up the most numerous section of the collection, with 923 pieces, most of them from Porto, at the end of the 19th century. Pieces such as the insignias of the Imperial Order of the Cross, the Military Order of Christ, and the Imperial Order of the Rose stand out, in addition to the Baccarat crystal lamps from France and furniture dating from the 17th to the 19th century.