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The Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions

Diputación de Málaga
Museo de Artes y Costumbre Popuilares. Málaga

The Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions

Temporarily closed for works

This Museum is the fruit of a joint effort by a number of different institutions to provide the city with the ethnographical museum that it had been crying out for since the first quarter of the 20th century, a place in which to preserve traditions and ways of life in danger of becoming obsolete and being lost forever in the face of the modern technology that is changing the way we live. The museum was also conceived as a tourist attraction in this eminently cosmopolitan city. The initiative is based on three main principles: the restoration of a historic and artistic building to accommodate the collections displayed, the assembly of a collection in just a few years and the creation and management of a museum by a private company, the Caja de Ahorros Provincial de Málaga (Saving Provincial Bank), now known as Unicaja.
Already in existence was a small ethnographical collection in the Fine Arts section of the Malaga Provincial Museum for which no place could be found among the deposits or exhibition areas of the Fine Arts Museum. The individuals behind the Fine Arts and Popular Traditions Museum were Baltasar Peña Hinojosa, Chairman of the San Telmo Academy and of the administrative board of the Provincial Saving Bank, and Enrique Garcîa-Herrera, legal adviser to the Provincial Council, who, after visiting a number of ethnographical museums in Spain, in particular the Fine Arts and Popular Traditions Museum of Seville, which served as their model, decided to begin a campaign to amass an ethnographical collection in the province of Malaga, the result of which was a compilation of some considerable size. This was pooled with the aforementioned ethnological exhibits from the Fine Arts section of the Malaga Provincial Museum, to which our museum is still affiliated.

A key moment in the museum’s development was the decision to locate it in the former Mesón Franciscano de la Victoria, a building already earmarked by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Telmo, through one of its members, Juan Temboury Álvarez, who in 1963 sent a full report to the Central Monuments Commission of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando recommending that, in accordance with the Decree of the 22nd of July 1958, it be declared a local and provincial monument. As a result of this request, official Local Monument of Historical and Artistic Interest status was conferred upon the Mesón de la Victoria by the Director General of Fine Arts via a Ministerial Order dated the 17th of September 1964.

 

THE BUILDING

An XVIII-century building with an impressive collection of objects, utensils, household furnishings, tools, paintings, sketches and posters, ranging from the most artistic to the most banal, from centuries gone by. Its architecture is basically Renaissance in style, with a Platerseque exterior and Mudêjar details. It is the best example of aristocratic architecture built after the conquest of Malaga by the Catholic Monarchs.

How to get there

Plaza Enrique García-Herrera, 1
Zip Code 29005

More information

Discover more about the province of Malaga

Discover more about the province of Malaga