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Catalonia plans a large national reserve to preserve 140,000 museum pieces
A building of almost 30,000 square meters in Sant Fruitós de Bages will house a heritage infrastructure with a planned investment of 73 million euros to improve the conservation and management of the country's museum collections.
With the premise of preservation, the Generalitat de Catalunya has chosen an industrial building in Sant Fruitós de Bages to install the future National Museum Reserve, a facility intended to respond to the storage and conservation needs of Catalan public collections. The project envisages having a capacity to safeguard up to 140,000 pieces and is conceived as a national infrastructure at the service of museums and the protection of heritage.
The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, visited the facilities this Sunday and defined the project as a 'pioneering' initiative. During the visit, he stressed the importance of culture and memory in the current context: "It is time to have a lot of memory and a lot of culture, and more conviction than ever."
The Generalitat has already formalized the contract with the property owner, the company P3. The operation includes an initial three-year rental period, with a cost of 8.3 million euros, followed by the purchase of the building for 41.2 million. To these amounts will be added 23.5 million euros for adaptation and renovation works. Overall, the planned investment is around 73 million euros.
The selection of the space responds to a need that the Department of Culture considers a priority: the lack of adequate reserves to preserve the works and objects that form part of the museum collections. Currently, many institutions have to distribute their collections between their own warehouses and rented spaces, a situation that makes resource management difficult and can limit conservation conditions. The new reserve aims to offer a shared response, with criteria of functionality, accessibility and efficiency.
The building chosen is located in an industrial estate and was built to house the logistics activity of a large commercial area, although it has never been used for this purpose. It is a newly built, open-plan building, which allows for an internal distribution adapted to the different storage needs. The property has 33,488 square meters built on an independent plot of 65,800 square meters. Its location, relatively equidistant from different points in the territory and well connected by road, has also been a determining factor in facilitating the transport of the pieces.
The National Reserve is not designed to replace the deposits that each museum manages independently, but to complement them and expand the possibilities of heritage conservation. The future facility will be able to house collections from national museums and museums of national interest, as well as from centers owned by the Generalitat or with a majority participation from the Catalan Administration. It will also provide services to registered museums at provincial, regional and local levels, and will allow the safekeeping of pieces from the Generalitat's National Collection, historical and artistic collections and archaeological materials.
In addition to museum collections, the space will be able to receive assets from police seizures and judicial deposits, as well as collections that require extraordinary custody following emergencies or natural disasters. This diversity of functions places the project beyond a simple warehouse: it is about creating a shared structure to strengthen the protection of cultural assets and facilitate their management on a national scale.
The Department of Culture presents the initiative as an "unprecedented" infrastructure due to its dimensions and the number of institutions it will serve. It is expected to benefit the 122 museums in the system, contribute to more efficient management of public resources and guarantee adequate preservation conditions for the collections.
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