Barcelona Ethnological Museum

A space to discover the diversity and wealth of Catalan society

Hola Barcelona, your travel solution

Red Route

MNAC stop

Barcelona Ethnological Museum offers an anthropological route structured into six major areas that use objects, audiovisual elements, texts and multimedia content to explain Catalonia’s cultural and social evolution.

Barcelona Bus Turístic, on the Hola Barcelona app

Your app for visiting the city with the Barcelona Bus Turístic: routes, stops and the most iconic places. A comfortable way to carry your tickets too!

What to visit at the Ethnological Museum

Barcelona Ethnological Museum was created at the request of a group of Catalan ethnography intellectuals and academics who in the early 20th century fostered the creation of an interpretation centre on the cultural, social and economic reality of traditional societies. In 1942 the Museum of Popular Industries and Arts was created, followed in 1949 by the Ethnological and Colonial Museum.

These two museums seeded a collection based on pieces gathered from the middle of the 19th century to the early 20th century from the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea, Ecuador and Peru, in addition to popular and traditional cultural materials from societies throughout Catalonia.

In 1962 the two museums were merged into one and in 1973 the building that currently houses the museum’s collection on Catalan cultural and social traditions was opened. The pieces from African, Asian, American and Oceanic cultures are exhibited at the Museum of World Cultures, which separated from the ethnological museum in 2012.

How do you get to the Ethnological Museum?

Barcelona Ethnological Museum is located next to the National Art Museum of Catalonia. To get there you can take the Red Route of Barcelona Bus Turístic and hop off at the MNAC stop.

For the most curious of you

Did you know? It is the first building in the 20th century to have been expressly designed to house a museum in Barcelona.

Local’s tip: It you enter the museum, make sure you see "The Wall": a large frieze of objects that occupies the entire side of the large hall of the museum forming a collage that integrates pieces from different geographic, historic and thematic sources.