Beyond the baccarat tables, Macau keeps four centuries of Sino-Portuguese layering: merchant mansions with shell windows and stained glass, a free museum of Pearl River watercolours, a 1860 neoclassical theatre, and Coloane shipyards turned art zone.
Camões Garden's banyan grove hides the 1770s Casa Garden — the British East India Company's old Macau headquarters, now Fundação Oriente's gallery — beside the walled Protestant cemetery where painter George Chinnery was buried in 1852.
The 1869 compound of reformist writer Zheng Guanying: 4,000m² of moon gates, Indian-influenced plasterwork and Portuguese louvred shutters across some 60 rooms and four courtyards. Open 10:00-18:00, closed Wednesdays.
Macau's only dedicated art museum stacks five floors of Shiwan ceramics, Qing seals and Chinnery's Pearl River watercolours above contemporary shows from Guangdong and the Portuguese-speaking world. Open 10:00-19:00, closed Mondays.
The pastel calçada around Calçada da Igreja de S. Lázaro is Macau's design quarter: Albergue SCM's 1920s ochre villas under two century-old camphor trees hold craft studios, a Portuguese kitchen and rotating exhibitions.
Built into the 1626 ramparts of Monte Fort, three floors trace the Portuguese-Chinese collision: firecracker workshops, a reconstructed Rua da Felicidade shopfront, recorded hawker cries and Macanese wedding costume.
Aida de Jesus's canteen has served Macanese home cooking since 1975: minchi, tacho stew and capela meatloaf ladled from steel trays under strip lighting in an unmarked shopfront on Avenida Sidónio Pais. Cash only.
China's first Western-style theatre opened in 1860 behind mint-green neoclassical columns on Largo de Santo Agostinho; the 300-seat auditorium still hosts the Macao Arts Festival and chamber recitals each spring.
The waterfront CCM houses the Macao Orchestra and Macao Chinese Orchestra, with a 1,100-seat grand auditorium programming Cantonese opera, ballet and the Macao International Music Festival through October.
A 1906 Suzhou-style garden built by Lou Kau's son: nine-turn zigzag bridge over lotus ponds, limestone grottoes and a European-fronted pavilion. The Moorish-style Sun Yat Sen Memorial House sits two streets away.
Macau's last old-style tea house, upstairs beside the 1936 art-deco Red Market since 1962: ceiling fans, wooden booths, self-serve bamboo steamers of har gow and siu mai, and pots refilled from a metal kettle. Cash only.
Five mint-green 1921 Portuguese villas on stilts along Avenida da Praia, once civil servants' homes, now holding Macanese period rooms, a Nostalgic House and exhibition galleries facing the old lagoon esplanade.
Coloane's timber junk shipyards, idle since 2005, have reopened as a heritage art zone of skeletal wooden frames over the water; the village square and the 1928 Chapel of St. Francis Xavier are a short walk south.