Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 04/06/2026 18:23:00

Opened on 11 December 2025 inside the vaulted Furnas cellars beneath the old Alfandega building on the Douro waterfront, Dino Experience Porto is a digital exhibition built around the world of the dinosaurs. The show was developed by the OCUBO atelier under the scientific supervision of the Museu da Lourinha and the Natural History and Science Museum of the University of Porto, and it occupies the same Immersivus Gallery space that hosts the long-running Porto Legends production. Four themed rooms make up the route. The first uses video-mapped 360 degree projections to wrap the stone walls in an animated encyclopaedia of dinosaur history, working through geological time from the Triassic up to the asteroid impact. A second room shows real fossils alongside a working palaeontology bench and a sandbox where visitors brush their way down to a buried bone. The third room is a virtual reality space using LBVR, location based virtual reality, where small groups walk freely through a shared Jurassic landscape and interact with each other and the creatures inside it. A final infinity room reconstructs the moment of the meteor strike that ended the Cretaceous. The exhibition runs roughly 60 minutes and is set up to suit children and adults equally, with tickets between 8 and 12 euros and discounts for families, students and residents of Porto. It opens Tuesday through Sunday with the first slot from 14:00 on weekdays and an earlier 10:00 start on weekends. Combined tickets bundle the experience with Porto Legends in the same complex, and parking is available on the Alfandega site for visitors driving in from outside the city centre. The wider Alfandega complex itself, completed in 1869 to a design by Jean Colson as the central customs house of nineteenth century Porto, has been progressively repurposed since 1991 into a major congress and cultural venue. The underground Furnas vaults that house Dino Experience and the parallel Porto Legends show were originally used for the bonded storage of cocoa, coffee and dry goods passing through the river port across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Alfandega forms the south-west corner of the wider UNESCO World Heritage zone of central Porto, and the surrounding waterfront is connected to the city centre by the Massarelos tram line and by the broader Ribeira pedestrian route along the north bank of the Douro.