MUHBA (Museu d'Història de Barcelona)

MUHBA's main site occupies the medieval Palau Reial Major on Plaça del Rei in the Barri Gòtic, but its principal draw lies beneath the square: roughly 4,000 square meters of excavated Roman Barcino, the colony founded under Emperor Augustus around 15 BCE. A network of underground walkways, reached by elevator from the Casa Padellàs entrance, threads through the remains of Roman streets, a laundry and dye works, wine-making vats, garum fish-sauce factories, and the foundations of a 4th-century Christian basilica, giving visitors a street-level view of daily commercial life in the colony during the 1st to 7th centuries CE. Above ground, the museum continues into the Palau Reial Major's medieval halls, including the Saló del Tinell, a vast 14th-century banqueting hall with stone arches where, according to tradition, the Catholic Monarchs received Christopher Columbus after his first voyage, and the Capella de Santa Àgata, a Gothic royal chapel. The curatorial approach is chronological and site-specific: rather than displaying portable artifacts in cases, MUHBA presents the city's own physical fabric in place, letting visitors walk the actual Roman street grid and medieval royal rooms rather than reconstructions. Interpretive panels and an audio guide connect the underground Roman remains to the medieval structures above, tracing Barcelona's continuous urban development from colony to Counts' residence to modern Gothic Quarter. The museum operates several satellite sites across the city under the same umbrella, including Roman burial grounds and the Water Park refinery, but the Plaça del Rei complex remains the core visit, offering the most complete single view of how Roman Barcino's grid still underlies the medieval and modern street plan of central Barcelona today.