Urgent Recovery of Culture: Brazil to rebuild national museum after fire

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02:48

Brazil has announced emergency funding to begin the re-construction of its National Museum. A massive fire ripped through the 200-year-old facility Sunday night. The museum hosted more than 20 million artifacts, and only 10 percent of them survived. The government has been accused of neglect after the disaster. CGTN's Lucrecia Franco reports.

It is a grim site, a metaphor for what many say is Brazil's own state of affairs after years of political and economic crisis.

The 200-year-old National Museum - one of most important natural history and anthropology museums in the Americas - now reduced to ashes.

A victim of government spending cuts, some say. Stung by the criticism, Brazilian officials announced an emergency plan to rebuild the museum.

ROSSIELI SOARES DA SILVA BRAZILIAN MINISTER OF EDUCATION "The education ministry will immediately distribute an initial 2.4 million dollars to guarantee, first of all, the safety of the museum."

Forensic investigators have also started to look for the remaining collection-more than eleven thousand years' worth of artifacts that were inside the palace that once served as home of the Portuguese royal family.

LUCRECIA FRANCO RIO DE JANEIRO "Museum officials say it's impossible to put a value on the collection destroyed by the fire. Many of the artifacts were irreplaceable, they say. But they also insist that the museum is not dead."

Cristiana Serejo, a vice director of the museum, says the library, the vertebrate and botanical departments, housed separately, escaped the fire.

CRISTIANA SEREJO VICE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL MUSEUM "I started saying that 90 percent was lost when you see the main building, but we still got other areas of the museum that are still alive and we got these collections to maintain our research."

A meteorite, weighing over 5.6 tons, the largest ever found in Brazil, also survived.

But major pieces such as Luzia, considered the oldest human fossil in South America, bones of Brazilian dinosaurs, an Egyptian collection and five million insects, among other treasures all went up in smoke.

Experts say it will take some time to identify what remains of the 20 million artifacts that made the this country's oldest scientific institution a living archive of Brazilian history. Lucrecia Franco, CGTN, Rio de Janeiro.