The definitive travel guide to Barcelona

The Museu National d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) is housed in the Palau National, a neo-baroque palace. The museum building is located at the bottom of the mountain Montjuïc. The Palau was originally the Spanish Pavilion of the World Exhibition of 1929. After intensive renovation it was reopened in 1997. The museum collected total of more than 260,000 objects of art and thus is certainly the largest and most significant museum in Barcelona.
Through a Catalonian Museum-Act, the Museum MNAC was founded in 1990 by the merger of the Museu d'Art de Catalunya (Romantic, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque) and the Museu d'Art Modern (art of the 19th and 20th centuries).

Probably the world's largest collection of Romanesque frescoes fill the majority of the halls of the MNAC. The Romanesque frescoes come from the vestibules of 29 great Romanesque churches in the Pyrenees. So they were saved from destruction by the Spanish Civil War. The frescoes are stored in so-called "ambits". These are small, separated areas. In every Ambit there is information related to the church, from which the frescoes are. In addition, the MNAC shows numerous sacred objects.

The MNAC has the most important collection of Catalan art from the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th Century. Several art-history phases are mixing in this times: Neoclassicism, Realism, Modernism (Catalan Art Nouveau). In addition to the Romanesque frescoes you can find a division of Gothic frescoes and statues and a small collection focused on works of the Baroque and the Renaissance. The "Gabinete Numismatico de Cataluña" (GNC) has the most significant public collection of coins, a total of 130,000 units,from 6 Century BC until now 7.800 pieces are exhibited. Furthermore in the restored Palau National there are many temporary exhibitions.

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