Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona


The Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona is a natural history museum located in Barcelona, Spain.

History

The Museum was created in 1882 following the bequest, patronage and will and testament of a local business broker, Francesc Martorell Peña, who left on this purpose to the city of Barcelona his personal archaeological and natural history collections. At creation in 1882 the museum was named Museo Martorell de Arqueología y Ciencias Naturales and was the first building in the history of Barcelona to be designed as a museum. Very soon, the archaeological, botanical and zoological collections were relocated elsewhere and the name was changed to Museo Martorell de Geología. Another building that is also located in the Parc de la Ciutadella, the nearby Castle of the Three Dragons, built in 1888 for the Barcelona Universal Exposition, was assigned to the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona in 1917 and started exhibiting the zoological collections as of 1920. Both buildings, the Geology Museum at the Martorell Museum and the Zoology Museum at the Castle of the Three Dragons, closed their doors to the public in 2010, although they still belong to the same institution, the Museum of Natural Sciences. In the meantime, the two main botanical gardens of the city, the Historical Botanical Garden of Barcelona and the Botanical Garden of Barcelona, joined the Museum in 2008. In 2010, the Forum Building was also assigned to the Museum. It is intended to show to the public the main permanent exhibition of the institution, which opened to the public in March 2011. At first called el Museu Blau, the Forum Building changed its allocated function name to the official name of the institution in December 2017.

The museum in the present day

Since 2011, the merge of the above mentioned entities reached the number of five different sites, all of them recognised as official seats by the Museum: