Barcelona City History Museum

The Barcelona City History Museum is a city museum that conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the historical heritage of the city of Barcelona, from its origins in Roman times until the present day; it is funded by the Barcelona municipality. The museum's headquarters are located on Plaça del Rei, in the Barcelona Gothic Quarter . It also manages several historic sites all around the city, most of them archaeological sites displaying remains of the ancient Roman city, called Barcino in Latin. Some others date to medieval times, including the Jewish quarter and the medieval royal palace called the Palau Reial Major. The rest are contemporary, among them old industrial buildings and sites related to Antoni Gaudí and the Spanish Civil War. The museum was inaugurated on 14 April 1943; its principal promoter and first director was the historian Agustí Duran i Sanpere.HistorySince the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition there are recorded some attempts and projects in order to create a museum about the History of Barcelona.In 1929 during the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition the municipality organized a temporary exhibition about Barcelona's past, present and future that constitutes the forerunner of the Barcelona City History Museum.In 1931, Casa Padellàs (Padellas's house), a late gothic palace (15th-16th centuries) was moved stone by stone from its original location on Mercaders street to Plaça del Rei, in order to preserve it and to avoid its demolition because of the opening of Via Laietana, an avenue created to connect the new Barcelona Eixample with the port, crossing the old city.