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Coverage / Macau

Macau

East Asia

A dense peninsula-and-islands city on the Pearl River delta, a former Portuguese trading post returned to China in 1999 and now a Special Administrative Region, where a UNESCO-listed historic centre of baroque churches and Chinese temples, a distinctive Macanese food culture and a mid-November street-circuit Grand Prix sit beside the casino towers of the Cotai Strip.

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What you can do in Macau

Culinary / Cooking

Macau PeninsulaJan Feb Mar Apr Oct Nov DecMacau is a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, and the reason is Macanese cooking, arguably the world's first fusion cuisine, born four hundred years ago when Portuguese sailors, wives and cooks met Cantonese kitchens and the spice routes of Goa, Malacca and Africa. It is home food, not restaurant show food: minchi of minced beef and potato, tacho stews, African chicken, curried crab, and the caramelised Portuguese egg tart that the city made its own. Because so much of it lives in family kitchens, the way to learn it is a hands-on class with a Macanese cook. Chef Antonieta Manhao, known as Neta, teaches classic dishes in her studio and has taken the cuisine into an award-winning cookbook, while dedicated pastry workshops on the peninsula walk you through laminating and baking the egg tart from scratch. You cook, then you eat what you made.

Museums & Galleries

Historic Centre of MacauJan Feb Mar Apr Oct Nov DecThe Historic Centre of Macau, inscribed by UNESCO in 2005, is a rare living overlay of Chinese and Portuguese life across more than twenty monuments and squares, and the best way in is through its museums. The Macao Museum sits on top of Monte Fort, the Jesuit-built fortress of 1617 to 1626 that overlooks the ruins of St Paul's, and lays out the city's origins, trade, folk religion and Macanese daily life across three floors. A short walk downhill, the Mandarin's House is the largest surviving Qing courtyard residence in Macau, the restored home of the reformist thinker Zheng Guanying, a maze of moon gates, sky wells and grey brick begun in 1868. Between the fortress museum and the mandarin's mansion you read the whole cross-cultural story of the place on foot, all inside the World Heritage zone.

Music & Culture Festivals

Macao International Music FestivalMacau PeninsulaOct NovThe Macao International Music Festival is the city's flagship autumn arts event, its Music October, filling the peninsula with concerts for about a month every year. First staged in 1987 and run by the government Cultural Affairs Bureau, it spreads performances across the modern Macao Cultural Centre and the atmospheric heritage venues of the old town, from the baroque St Dominic's Church to the neoclassical Dom Pedro V Theatre inside the UNESCO World Heritage zone. The programme deliberately braids East and West, pairing opera, symphonic concerts and chamber music with Chinese works and crossover projects, and building each edition around a theme. Hearing a concert inside a centuries-old Macau church or the little Dom Pedro V, one of the oldest Western theatres in China, is the draw as much as the music itself.

Witness / Attend

Macau Grand PrixGuia CircuitNovThe Macau Grand Prix turns the peninsula's ordinary streets into one of the most demanding circuits in the world for one weekend every November. First run in 1954, it races on the 6.2 kilometre Guia Circuit, a genuine street track that mixes a flat-out harbourfront straight with the notorious Lisboa corner and a tight, walled, uphill twist through the Guia hill that leaves no room for error. The bill is unusual: the FIA Formula 3 World Cup, where future Formula 1 drivers have long made their names, shares the programme with the Macau Motorcycle Grand Prix and the FIA GT World Cup, so single-seaters, superbikes and GT machinery all run the same barriered streets. Watching from the grandstands at Lisboa or the Reservoir, with cars inches from the walls, is the reason to come, a motor race with nowhere to hide.

Best months at a glance

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Culinary
Museums
Music Festivals
Witness / Attend

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