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The Museu do Ouro (Tues-Sun noon-5.30pm) is a short but steep signposted walk up from Praca Santa Rita on Rua da Intendencia, but well worth the effort. Built in 1732, this is the only royal foundry house remaining in Brazil. When gold was discovered in Minas Gerais, the Portuguese Crown was entitled to a fifth of the output but had to collect it first. To do so, it put a military cordon around the gold mines, and then built several royal foundries, where gold from the surrounding area was melted down, franked and the royal fifth deducted. The functional building that now houses the museum easily reveals its origins: it is built around an interior courtyard, overlooked by a balcony on three sides, from where the officials could keep an eagle eye on gold being melted into bars and weighed. Along with the other royal foundry in Ouro Preto, it was Brazil's most heavily guarded building. Most of the museum is devoted to gold-mining history. Downstairs are rooms full of colonial scales, weights, pans and other mining instruments, and a strongroom where until 1986 you could see genuine eighteenth-century gold bars and jewels in the safe. Unfortunately, that year two men walked in, put a pistol to the guard's head and walked off with the safe's contents, which have never been recovered: the bars on display now are plaster casts of the real thing, although they look authentic enough. Upstairs you'll find the usual collection of colonial furniture and some moderate arte sacra, but also some interesting prints and one very fine painted ceiling, representing the four continents known at the time it was built. In a room off the courtyard, to the right of the large wooden water-driven grinding mill, is a model of the Morro Velho mine in nearby Nova Lima, the deepest gold mine in the world outside South Africa. There's a commemorative photograph of the 44 Welsh mining engineers and single Brazilian lawyer who began it, all working for the wonderfully named St John del Rey Gold Mining Company.
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