China; Monday, 06 April, 2026

With most of the museums in the city closed on a Monday my day was mostly going to be focused on visiting some of the city’s many temples and viewpoints, with the first stop of the morning being the A-Ma temple, located to the southern end of the peninsula and one of the oldest temples in the city.

Close to the A-Ma Temple is that rare of things, a museum in Macau that’s open on a Monday, so I was able to pop in and visit the Maritime Museum, which charts the history of everything sea related in this crucial port city.

The distance from the museum to my next stop was probably less than 200m, sadly it was that distance both horizontally and vertically so in increasingly humid conditions I took the winding road up the hill to the Capel de Noassa Senhora da Penha and it’s viewpoint that looks out over the southern end of the peninsula and across to the island of Cotai, including the impressive bridges that link the two parts of the city. I also had a brief look around the inside of the chapel, though there is little to see inside.

From the chapel it was back down hill again, this time to the Casa do Mandarim, or the Mandarin’s House. This is an historic mansion house in the city that was built by a wealthy local family that had connections and were able to construct a sprawling mansion over a large area. From the outside the building doesn’t look that large, but as you enter the grounds you see the whole structure made up of multiple courtyards and corridors.

My next destination were a series of temples located close together on the other side of the city, which would have been a 30 minute walk, and the only direct bus was a little hoppa bus that winds its way around the city taking a similar amount of time to get there, but the bus has a seat and is air conditioned, so in the muggy conditions I hopped on that and headed over towards my three temples for the afternoon the Templo de Pou Chai, Templo de Kun Iam Tchai and the Templo de Lin Fong

The first of the temples is one of the largest in the city and certainly has the most impressive garden which covers almost as much space as the temple itself. It’s also historically one of the most interesting as it was in the gardens of this temple that the Americans forced a weakened Chinese Emperor to sign a treaty that gave them very unequal trading rights.

The Templo de Kun Iam Tchai was quite small, and I didn’t spend much time there before moving onto the impressive Templo de Lin Fong which had a large number of shrines to be able to look around.

The final temple of the day also sat at the foot of the northern most hill in the city, which, like most other hills in the city is topped by a fort, in this case the Fortaleza de Mong-Há and after a relatively lengthy climb up through the park that the fort now sits in I was able to reach the viewing platform located on the top of the fort. The rest of the building is closed to the public, but from up here there are good views over the city.

I wandered down back through the parkland that the fort sits in and headed over to the bus stop to pick up the bus back to the hotel before heading out a little later to grab a bite to eat and then heading over to the Lotus Square, located close to the Outer Harbour and home to the Golden Lotus statue – the symbol of the city.

From there it was a short walk over to the Fisherman’s Wharf, a strange shopping and leisure destination that has recreations of various buildings from across the world, including a replica of Rome’s Colosseum, as well as buildings from Amsterdam, New Orleans and Cape Town. After having a look around, I headed back over to the Outer Harbour to pick up the bus back to the hotel and my bed.