This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Funding cuts and inadequate maintenance have been blamed for a devastating fire that tore through Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum, and is feared to have destroyed much of its archive of 20m items.

Brazil's national museum: what could be lost in the fire? Read more

The blaze at the 200-year-old National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro began at about 7.30pm local time and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but senior staff have described the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture as incalculable.



By Monday morning, the flames had been extinguished, leaving museum directors to survey the smouldering ruins of Brazil’s heritage. Although they were initially wary of calculating losses, the gutted building suggests the toll will be immense.

As the day progressed, ever more people tried to enter the park in which the building is housed to get a glimpse of its burned husk, and police eventually opened the gates. At one point, officers in riot gear fired teargas into a small, angry crowd of protesters who had gathered outside the park’s entrance.



The museum was home to Egyptian and Graeco-Roman artefacts, fossils, dinosaurs and 12,000-year-old “Luzia” – the oldest human skeleton in the Americas.

But perhaps the greatest blow is the likely destruction of indigenous artefacts, which showed how millions of people lived in pre-colonial times.



José Urutau Guajajara, who studied his community’s history at the museum, said: “This is the greatest loss of indigenous writing in Latin America. Our memory has been erased.”

Mércio Gomes, an anthropologist and a former president of Brazil’s indigenous agency, Fundação Nacional do Índio (Funai), compared the loss to the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48BC.

“We Brazilians have only 500 years of history. Our National Museum was 200 years old. Our memory is small, but that’s what we had, and it is lost for ever,” he wrote on Facebook. “We have to reconstruct our National Museum.”

Brazil’s culture minister, Sérgio Leitão, told the Estado de S Paulo newspaper that the blaze was likely caused by either an electrical short-circuit or a homemade, paper hot-air balloon that may have landed on the roof.

While the cause of the blaze is still under investigation, government cuts and inadequate fire protection systems have been cited as key factors. Rio’s fire chief, Roberto Robaday, tsaid the two hydrants nearest the museum were dry, delaying efforts to douse the flames.



In recent years, the government has spent billions on the Olympics and major construction projects that generated kickbacks for politicians, but slashed spending on culture and education in the name of austerity.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest People watch fireworks over the Maracanã Stadium at the start of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Andrej Isakovic/AFP/Getty

Luiz Duarte, one of the museum’s vice-directors, said politicians were to blame for failing to support the museum and letting it deteriorate. No state ministers appeared at its 200th birthday celebrations in June.

“For many years, we fought with different governments to get adequate resources to preserve what is now completely destroyed,” he said. “My feeling is of total dismay and immense anger.”

Duarte said the museum had just closed a deal with the Brazilian government’s development bank, BNDES, for funds that included a fire-prevention project. “This is the most terrible irony,” he said.

The Brazilian president, Michel Temer, who has presided over cuts to science and education, called the losses “incalculable”.

“Today is a sad day for all Brazilians,” he tweeted. “Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge were lost.”

Leitão acknowledged that the fire was a “tragedy [that] could have been avoided”, but said the problems of the museum, which is part of the Federal University (UFRJ), had been “piling up over time”.

He tweeted: “They didn’t start this year. In 2015, for example, it was closed for lack of resources for its maintenance. Revitalisation was due to begin now, with BNDES sponsorship. The project included fire protection.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People console each other outside the museum the day after the devastating blaze. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty

Marina Silva, a former environment minister and a candidate for the presidential election to be held in October, said the fire was like “a lobotomy of the Brazilian memory”.

She tweeted: “Unfortunately, given the financial shortages of the UFRJ and the other public universities in the last three years, this was a tragedy foretold.”

On Sunday night, as the blaze crackled through the former palace, sending smoke and embers billowing into the sky, curators and firefighters had managed to salvage a few boxes, some jars of biological specimens and a microscope. Some items had also been stored in a separate building.

When firefighters searched the charred remains of the immense collection the following morning, the only item that appeared to have survived was a chunk of meteorite from what had been Brazil’s biggest collection of items that fell from outer space.

Some held out hope that the collection might have been digitised, but this possibility gave little solace to those whose identities were shaped and bolstered by the tangible presence of sacred or historically significant items.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dozens of people demonstrate in front of the museum, which had an archive of 20m items. Photograph: Antonio Lacerda/EPA

Several indigenous people gathered at the scene and criticised the fact that the museum containing their most precious artefacts had burned down, seemingly because there was no money for the maintenance of hydrants, yet the city had recently managed to find a huge budget to build a new “museum of tomorrow”.

Several dozen people congregated outside the gates, several of whom were clearly distraught. Others blamed the government’s austerity policies and corruption.

Some Brazilians saw the fire as a metaphor for their country’s traumas as it struggles with rising levels of violent crime and the effects of a recession that has left more than 12 million people unemployed.



Bernardo Mello Franco, one of Brazil’s best-known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper website: “The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide. A crime against our past and future generations.”