Museum sights in Spain
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Museu del Futbol Club Barcelona
One of Barcelona's most visited museums is the Museu del Futbol Club Barcelona, next to the club's giant Camp Nou stadium. Barça is one of Europe's top football clubs and its museum is a hit with fans the world over.
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Museu Picasso
Barcelona’s most visited museum occupies five of the many fine medieval stone mansions (worth wandering into for their courtyards and galleries) on narrow Carrer de Montcada. This collection is uniquely fascinating, concentrating on Picasso’s formative years and several specific moments in his later life, but those interested primarily in cubism may not be satisfied. There are additional charges for special exhibitions; entry is free from 3pm Sundays and all day the first Sunday of the month. Allow two hours. The museum’s permanent collection is housed in the first three houses, the Palau Aguilar, Palau del Baró de Castellet and the Palau Meca, all dating to the 14th cent…
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Fundació Joan Miró
Dedicated to one of the greatest artists to emerge in Barcelona in the 20th century, Joan Miró, this is a must-see gallery.
The foundation holds the greatest single collection of the artist’s work, comprising around 220 of his paintings, 180 sculptures, some textiles and more than 8000 drawings spanning his entire life. Only a smallish portion is ever on display. The displays tend to concentrate on Miró’s more settled last 20 years, but there are some important exceptions. The Sala Joan Prats and Sala Pilar Juncosa show work by the younger Miró that traces him slowly moving away from a relative realism towards his own signature style. Transitional works from the 1930s an…
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Centre d'Interpretació del Call
At the Centre d'Interpretació del Call, you can learn something of the history of the one-time Jewish community in Barcelona through some explanatory panels. A small cabinet of Jewish artefacts and ceramic shards are all that is on show.
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Centro de Interpretación del Sacromonte
This wide-ranging ethnographic and environmental museum and arts centre is set in large grounds planted with all manner of herbs where you can also see art exhibitions and attend a herbal remedy workshop. Morning is the best time to see the artists at work. The centre has an outdoor flamenco music, dance and film programme on Wednesday and Friday from June to September.
It's difficult to see flamenco that's not geared to tourists but some shows are more authentic than others and attract Spaniards as well as foreigners. In summer the flamenco nights here are well worth catching. It also shows the gitanos' way of life and traditional crafts - metalwork, pottery, weaving, an…
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Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
The pompous-looking Palau Nacional, built in the 1920s for World Exhibition displays and designed to be a temporary structure, houses one of the city’s most important museums, a veritable compendium of art in Catalonia down the centuries.
The star collection is the Romanesque art but the extensive Gothic art section also contains interesting material, such as works by Catalan painters Bernat Martorell and Jaume Huguet. From the Gothic section, you pass through two eclectic private collections, the Cambò bequest and works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections. Works by the Venetian Renaissance masters Veronese (1528–88), Titian (1490–1557) and Canaletto (1697–1768), al…
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Palau Reial de Pedralbes
Across Avinguda Diagonal from the main campus of the Universitat de Barcelona, set in a lush, green park, is the 20th-century Palau Reial de Pedralbes, which belonged to the family of Eusebi Güell (Gaudí’s patron) until they handed it over to the city in 1926. Then it served as a royal residence – King Alfonso XIII, the president of Catalonia and General Franco, among others, have been its guests. Admission is free from 3pm Sundays and on the first Sunday of the month.
Today the palace houses two museums. The Museu de Ceràmica has a fine collection of Spanish ceramics from the 13th to 19th centuries, plus work by Picasso and Miró. The Disseny Hub is itself the fus…
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Museo de Cerralbo
Huddled beneath the modern apartment buildings northwest of Plaza de España, this noble old mansion is like an apparition of how wealthy madrileños once lived. The former home of the 17th Marqués de Cerralbo (1845–1922) – politician, poet and archaeologist – is a study in 19th-century opulence. The museum was closed for renovations at the time of writing, so for now you’ll have to admire it from the outside. When it reopens, the upper floor boasts a gala dining hall and a grand ballroom. The mansion is jammed with the fruits of the collector’s eclectic meanderings – from Oriental pieces to religious paintings and clocks. On the main floor are spread suits of armour from a…
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Museu Marítim
The once mighty Reials Drassanes (Royal Shipyards) are now home to the Museu Marítim, a rare work of civil Gothic architecture that was once the launch pad for medieval fleets. The museum, together with its setting, forms a fascinating tribute to the seafaring that shaped much of Barcelona’s history. You can take a load off afterwards in the pleasant restaurant-cafe. The shipyards, first built in the 13th century, gained their present form (a series of long bays divided by stone arches) a century later. Extensions in the 17th century made them big enough to handle the construction of 30 galleons at any one time. In their shipbuilding days (up to the 18th century), the sea…
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Museu de la Música
Some 500 instruments (less than a third of those held) are on show in this museum housed on the 2nd floor of the administration building in L’Auditori, the city’s main classical-music concert hall. Instruments range from a 17th-century baroque guitar through to lutes (look out for the many-stringed 1641 archilute from Venice), violins, Japanese kotos, sitars from India, eight organs (some dating to the 18th century), pianos, a varied collection of drums and other percussion instruments from across Spain and beyond, along with all sorts of phonographs and gramophones. There are some odd pieces indeed, like the buccèn, a snake-head-adorned brass instrument. Much of the…
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Museu de les Arts Decoratives, Palau Reial de Pedralbes
The Museu de les Arts Decoratives in Palau Reial de Pedralbes brings together an eclectic assortment of furnishings, ornaments and knick-knacks dating as far back as the Romanesque period. The plush and somewhat stuffy elegance of Empire- and Isabelline-style divans can be neatly compared with some of the more tasteless ideas to emerge on the subject of seating in the 1970s. It is planned eventually to house these collections in a brand-new design museum in Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes. When this will happen is open to speculation and, in the meantime, some of the collection will get a new temporary home in what was until 2008 the Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària in …
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Casa-Museu Salvador Dalí
Port Lligat, a 1.25km walk north of Cadaqués, is a tiny fishing settlement on a quiet, enchanting bay. God knows what serious-minded fishermen thought of Dalí’s seaside residence, antics and international jet-set pals. Dalí spent time (more than half his adult life) here, in what was originally a fisherman’s hut, from 1930 until 1982. Dalí had not come by choice. His father had forbidden him to return to the family house in Cadaqués after Dalí presented what was for his father an intolerable painting in Paris. Across an image of the Sacred Heart, Dalí had written: Parfois je crache par plaisir sur le portrait de ma mère (Sometimes I spit for fun on my mother’s…
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Casa de la Moneda
The national mint (literally the ‘house of coin’) is a collectors’ treasure-trove of coins from Ancient Greece and Roman Spain and proceeds through the Byzantine, Visigothic and Islamic periods. The latter period is particularly well represented. Coins from the days of the Catholic Monarchs abound, and the collection continues through to the establishment of the peseta as the Spanish currency – only consigned to history by the introduction of the euro in 2002. Paper money ranges from a 14th-century Chinese note to revolutionary Russian cash. Also on display is an extensive collection of prints and grabados (etchings), lottery tickets since 1942 and stamps. You can…
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Estación de Chamberí
For years, madrileños wandered what happened to the metro station called Chamberí – they knew it existed yet it appeared on no maps and no trains ever stopped there. Over four decades later, the mystery has been solved. The answer was that Chamberí station lay along Line 1, between the stops of Bilbao and Iglesia, until 1966 when Madrid’s trains (and, where possible, platforms) were lengthened. Logistical difficulties meant that Chamberí could not be extended and the station was abandoned. In early 2008 the Estación de Chamberí finally reopened to the public, if not for trains, serving as a museum piece that re-creates the era of the station’s inauguration in 1919 with ad…
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Museo da Catedral
The many-roomed Museo da Catedral, entered to the right of the cathedral's Obradoiro facade, spreads over four floors and includes the cathedral's large 16th-century, Gothic/plateresque cloister. You'll see Maestro Mateo's original stone choir (destroyed in 1603 but recently pieced back together), rooms of tapestries including a set from designs by Goya, an impressive collection of religious art (including the botafumeiro, in the second-floor library), the lavishly decorated 18th-century sala capitular (chapter house), and, off the cloister, the treasury and the Panteón de Reyes, which contains tombs of kings of medieval León. The museum ticket also covers the crypt benea…
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Fundació Antoni Tàpies
The Fundació is a pioneering Modernista building of the early 1880s, as well as a homage to, and by, the elder statesman of contemporary Catalan art, Antoni Tàpies. The collection spans the arc of his creations (with more than 800 works) but only a fraction of these is ever on show, always in conjunction with other temporary exhibitions. In the main exhibition area (level 1, upstairs), you can see an ever-changing selection of around 20 of Tàpies’ works, from early self-portraits of the 1940s to grand items like Jersei Negre (Black Jumper; 2008), in which the outline of a man with a hard-on is topped with a pasted-on black sweater. Level 2 hosts a small space for tem…
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Euskal Museoa
This museum is probably the most complete museum of Basque culture and history in all the Basque regions. The story kicks off back in the days of prehistory and from this murky period the displays bound rapidly through to the modern age. The main problem with the museum is that, unless you speak Spanish (or perhaps you studied Euskara at school?), it’s all a little meaningless as, amazingly, there are no English or French translations.
The museum is housed in a fine old building, at the centre of which is a peaceful cloister that was part of an original 17th-century Jesuit college. In the cloister is the Mikeldi Idol, a powerful pre-Christian, possibly Iron Age, symboli…
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Museu de Ceràmica, Palau Reial de Pedralbes
The palace houses two museums. The Museu de Ceràmica has a good collection of Spanish ceramics from the 13th to 19th centuries, including work by Picasso and Miró. Spain inherited from the Muslims, and then further refined, a strong tradition in ceramics – here you can compare some exquisite work (tiles, porcelain tableware and the like) from some of the greatest centres of pottery production across Spain, including Talavera de la Reina in Castile, Manises and Paterna in Valencia, and Teruel in Aragón. Upstairs is a display of fanciful modern ceramics from the 20th century – here they have ceased to be a tool with aesthetic value and are purely decorative.
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Fundación Francisco Godia
Francisco Godia (1921–90), head of one of Barcelona’s great establishment families, liked fast cars (he came sixth in the 1956 Grand Prix season driving Maseratis) and fine art. An intriguing mix of medieval art, ceramics and modern paintings make up this varied private collection, housed in Casa Garriga Nogués, a carefully restored and stunning Modernista residence originally built for a rich banking family by Enric Sagnier in 1902–05. The art is spread over the 1st floor, ranging from brightly coloured Romanesque wooden statues of the Virgin and Child, through classic Spanish ceramics to samples by Modernista painter Ramon Casas and Valencia’s Joaquim Sorolla.
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Museu d’Història de la Immigració de Catalunya
The star piece of this museum dedicated to the history of immigration in Catalonia is a wagon of the train known as El Sevillano, which in the 1950s trundled between Andalucía and Catalonia, jammed with migrants on an all-stops trip that often lasted more than 30 hours! The one-room exhibition in the former country house, Can Serra (now surrounded by light industry, ring roads and warehouses), contains a display of photos, text (in Catalan) and various documents and objects that recall the history of immigration to Catalonia from the 19th century on. There’s also an engaging video with images of migrant life decades ago and today.
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Museu Frederic Marès
A short distance north of Plaça del Rei is the Museu Frederic Marès, in another part of the Palau Reial Major. Marès was a rich 20th-century Catalan sculptor and collector. He specialised in medieval Spanish sculpture, huge quantities of which are displayed. In addition, there is a mind-boggling array of other Marès knick-knacks, from toy soldiers and cribs to scissors and tarot cards, along with some of his own sculptures. The shady courtyard houses a pleasant summer cafe, Cafè de l’Estiu, and a series of interactive screens that allow visitors to get an idea of the collection while the museum remains closed.
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Sitges Museums
Only half an hour from Barcelona by train, Sitges is a unique resort that in summer attracts hordes of fashionable city folk and a huge international gay set. A former fishing village, it was a trendy hang-out for artists and bohemians in the 1890s and has remained one of Spain's more unconventional resorts ever since. Sitges resort is no less attractive in winter, although you won't have much company as you cavort between its three museums, admire the sun-bleached baroque church atop a bluff over the beach, soak up the village atmosphere and wonder if it's too cold for a dip at the nude beach southwest of town.
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Cathedral
Málaga's Cathedral was begun in the 16th century on the former site of the main mosque. Building continued for two centuries, so while the northern door, Portada de la Iglesia del Sagrario, is Gothic, and the interior, with a soaring 40m dome, is Gothic and Renaissance, the facade is 18th-century baroque. The cathedral is known as La Manquita (the One-Armed), since its southern tower was never completed. Inside, note the 17th-century wooden choir stalls, as dark and smooth as chocolate, finely carved by the popular Andalucian sculptor Pedro de Mena.
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Museu i Centre d’Estudis de l’Esport Dr Melcior Colet
Puig i Cadafalch’s Casa Company (1911) looks like an odd Tyrolean country house and is marvellously out of place. A collection of photos, documents and other sports memorabilia stretches over two floors – from a 1930s pair of skis and boots (how did they get down mountains on those things?) to the skull-decorated swimming costume of a champion Catalan water-polo player. A curio on the ground floor is the replica of a stone commemoration in Latin of Lucius Minicius Natal, a Barcelona boy who won a quadriga (four-horse chariot) race at the 227th Olympic Games…in AD 129.
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Museu Barbier-Mueller d’Art Precolombí
Occupying Palau Nadal, this museum holds part of one of the world’s most prestigious collections of pre-Colombian art, including gold jewellery, ceramics, statues and textiles. The artefacts from indigenous South American cultures come from the collections of the Swiss businessman Josef Mueller (1887–1977) and his son-in-law Jean-Paul Barbier, who directs the Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva. The museum is small but the pieces are outstanding and often rotated, so that the exhibition is never quite the same on return visits. Admission is free on the first Sunday of the month.
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