Pontevedra Museum

About

Pontevedra Museum (formerly the Pontevedra Provincial Museum) is a museum in the Galician city of Pontevedra in Spain. It was founded by the Provincial Deputation of Pontevedra on 30 December 1927 and has six buildings for its dedicated to permanent and temporary exhibitions. The museum's collections are multidisciplinary, classified into rooms for painting, sculpture, archaeology, decorative arts, engraving and ethnography. The Pontevedra Museum was declared a Cultural Interest Property on 1 March 1962. It was awarded the Gold Medal of Galicia in 1996.

Pontevedra Museum was founded by the Provincial Council of Pontevedra in the pazo of Castro Monteagudo on 30 December 1927 and opened to the public on 10 August 1929.

Since 2012, the museum has occupied five historic buildings plus a sixth modern building, construction on which was begun in 2004 and inaugurated in 2012. These six buildings are: the Gothic ruins of the San Domingo Church and the García Flórez, Fernández López, Sarmiento (former Jesuit baroque college of the Saint Bartholomew's Church ) and Castro Monteagudo buildings as well as a large modern building, the Castelao Building, inaugurated in 2013.

In the first half of 2022, the museum recorded 108,543 visitors and by the end of the year almost 175,000.

The six directors of the Pontevedra Museum have been:

The six directors of the Pontevedra Museum have been:

This building dates from 1760, and bears this name because it was built by José de Castro y Monteagudo, the first auditor of the province of Pontevedra. It is the first building of the museum.

The different rooms traditionally displayed archaeological collections, pre-Roman and Roman goldsmithery, silverware and Gothic, Renaissance, still life and Spanish paintings. The permanent exhibition is currently being redesigned.

Three rooms in the Castro Monteagudo building are dedicated to archaeology, presenting significant remains from the prehistoric and protohistoric stages of Galicia. During the last renovation works, all these archaeological collections were transferred to the Sarmiento building. Some of the collections remain in their place in 2014, such as the traditional collection of Galician goldsmith's art.

Fernández de la Mora y Mon silverware collection

The collection of civil and religious silverware, on permanent display in the Castro Monteagudo building, was acquired by the writer and diplomat Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora y Mon. It consists of pieces from before 1900, with civil art predominating over sacred art. The pieces come from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, as well as from other places such as Russia and China.

A series of nickel-plated silverware (with lead alloy inlays ) includes Russian boxes and cup holders, Turkish snuff boxes and Thai cups.

One of the oldest pieces is a 15th or 16th century Byzantine baptismal cup. The most historically interesting is a New England preacher Thomas Hooker box from 1600, and the most noble is an early-19th-century Moscow snuff box with curved edges.

The most valuable piece is an imperial tureen, forged in Strasbourg in the 1800s, as well as a trophy jar given by the Empress of Germany, Augusta-Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, to the winner of a race in 1898, with gold coins inlaid with the effigies of the three emperors who ruled in the same year.

- Main article: Pazo de García Flórez The Pazo García Flórez is named after Antonio García Estévez Fariña and his wife Tomasa Suárez Flórez, who built this manor house on a previous pazo in the 18th century. It became part of the Provincial Museum of Pontevedra in 1943.

The collection on display in its rooms includes furniture and navigation equipment, the cabin of the armored frigate Numancia, religious sculptures, pottery and a traditional Galician cuisine, Engravings, Sargadelos earthenware and jet objects.

It was built in 1962 and completed in 1965. The name is a tribute to the main donor José Fernández López. It exhibits a large collection of romantic and historical paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, with rooms specifically dedicated to Goya and Joaquín Sorolla.

This building houses the museum's administrative offices, the library and the graphic archives (with over 500,000 entries).

The museum's Fernández López building was extended in the early 2000s, with the construction of an annex building designed in 1999 by the architect Celestino García Braña between Pasantería and Laranxo streets. The work was completed in 2002 and the new 1200 square metre building, a synthesis of traditional and modern architecture (consisting of the annexe of 2 houses and the construction of another building on the site of a former orchard) and intended for offices and rooms to provide service to researchers and documentalists, was inaugurated on 2 May 2003. The extension was awarded that same year by the Galician Association of Architects.

The library started with a batch of 108 books. In 2007, its collection included over 6,000 serial titles, over 150,000 bibliographic records, 500 maps and plans and documentation sections. It is a specialised library available to Researchers, with a reading room open to the public only for consultation of the collections, which cannot be borrowed. The library fulfils several tasks of scientific interest and collaborates with the Ministry of Culture and the Galician Government.