From seven in the evening until one in the morning, more than ninety museums, foundations, and cultural centers in the metropolitan area will open their doors for free in a new edition of the Night of the Museums. The event coincides in dates, as every year, with the International Museum Day —which is celebrated on May 18—, but the day has long since surpassed the idea of a simple open house day.
Concerts, immersive installations, dramatized visits, screenings, dance, poetry, and performances will fill a program that extends far beyond the city of Barcelona, with activities also in Badalona, L'Hospitalet, Cornellà, and Sant Joan Despí. Among this year's novelties are spaces such as the Gran Hotel Barcino —and the latest Roman finds— or the Centro Cultural La Bòbila, which are incorporated for the first time into an increasingly broad and diverse cultural network.
The Night of the Museums has consolidated itself as a different way to explore Barcelona: entering spaces pending for years, discovering buildings under another light, and letting oneself be carried away by an unexpected nocturnal rhythm. A night in which one often crosses the city almost by intuition, entering a museum because music is heard from the street or following a performance into a medieval cloister.
With open doors and free access to all facilities, the city can be explored with total freedom from one center to another, although some spaces —such as Palau Güell, Fundació Miró, or the CCCB— require prior free reservation, as do some specific activities. However, for those who want to give some coherence to the route and follow a more structured proposal, from The New Barcelona Post we have grouped the proposals by zones, tracing itineraries that connect museums and cultural spaces of the city.
Montjuïc: the city's great cultural epicenter
Beyond being a large green space to get lost on foot, Montjuïc has been configured, through the proliferation of sports, musical and cultural facilities, as one of the city's great cultural hubs. During the Night of the Museums, the hill gains even more prominence and becomes an essential stop, with up to eleven facilities open simultaneously that draw a route where art, history, architecture and music intersect in the same urban narrative.
As a gateway to the hill, the MNAC offers a dialogue between heritage and contemporaneity, between sacred space and sound experimentation. The tour goes from Catalan Romanesque —with special prominence given to exhibitions such as Sant Pere de Rodes i el Mestre de Cabestany— to the most current electronic music, with DJ sessions and the final concert in the Oval Room by Gregotechno, which fuses Gregorian chant and electronic rhythms in the key of a great rave with medieval imagery. With this soundtrack in the background, the museum also allows revisiting different layers of Catalan history, from the Francoist past —with the exhibition Recovered from the enemy, focused on works deposited by the National Artistic Heritage Defense Service— to the Civil War, through the eyes of artist José Luis Rey Vila.
A few minutes' walk away, the Barcelona hill also offers proposals such as Montjuïc Castle, which is opening a new Interpretation Center after a complex process of reform and works, or the always suggestive Fundació Joan Miró. But there are also options for lovers of the performing arts, with proposals from the Museum of Performing Arts —from the performance by vedette and cupletista Glòria Ribera to dance and theatrical visits— and for those who look at sport with different eyes, the Olympic and Sports Museum vindicates Montjuïc as a key setting in the city's sporting history.
If the route extends to the foothills of Montjuïc, the journey continues amidst architecture, art, and memory. The Mies van der Rohe pavilion opens a path that runs through CaixaForum —with exhibitions such as Chez Matisse, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, and a series of Microconcerts— and also delves into the Espai Bombers to discover the history of the city's fire department. Not far away, the Maritime Museum transforms the Drassanes Reials with a videomapping on the Royal Galley that turns the space into a large light installation.
Ciutat Vella: between history, poetry, and avant-garde
In the historic center of Barcelona, the Night of Museums is also experienced intensely. The narrow streets of the Gothic Quarter, La Rambla, and El Born become a mosaic of eras and languages, where each building seems to hide a different proposal. Visiting spaces like the Temple of Augustus, the Domus de Avinyó, or the Jewish Quarter —thanks to the Museu d'Història de Barcelona— in complete darkness allows rediscovering the city from an almost archaeological perspective, with ancient stones and Roman vestiges emerging in the city center.
But Ciutat Vella is not just the past: it is also experimentation and contemporaneity. At the Centre d'Arts Santa Mònica, the exhibition L'assalt de la il·lusió proposes an immersive journey through the mechanisms of the image and its capacity for manipulation in the era of deepfakes. Very close by, the Fundació Joan Brossa transforms the night into a poetic and scenic territory, with installations and performances that blur the lines between language, identity, and memory.
And still within this same more contemporary axis, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge presents one of the most unique experiences of the entire program: the screening of A Bunch of Questions with No Answers, a film of almost 23 hours that removes the answers from press conferences about the Gaza conflict and leaves only the questions, turning the center's courtyard into a space for continuous reflection on power, information, and institutional silences.
A few steps further, the Egyptian Museum proposes one of the most cinematic experiences of the night: exploring its halls, full of mummies, sarcophagi, and pharaonic sculptures, which evoke the sensation of stepping into a scene straight out of Night at the Museum. In addition, the day allows visitors to discover for free the new pieces incorporated into the collection just this week, which already exceeds 1,350 works, among which the anthropomorphic sarcophagus of Padiefty and several scarabs stand out, traditionally used in funerary rituals and placed on mummies as protective symbols.
But, amidst so many proposals and formats, the city's great classics will also be present, many of them concentrated in the streets of Born, such as the Picasso Museum, the MEAM, the Moco Museum, or the Chocolate Museum, which remain essential stops within the Night of the Museums.
Outside the museum map
Outside the traditional museum circuit, the proposal also ventures into less common cultural routes, such as Sant Andreu or Nou Barris, with spaces like Fabra i Coats, which has just opened one of its warehouses as the headquarters of the Museum of Work, or the Casa de l'Aigua in Nou Barris. But the Night of the Museums goes even further and expands the very idea of a museum, incorporating facilities that we would not normally associate with this concept.
This is the case of the old Barcelona prison, La Modelo, one of the most emotional spaces in the program, with cells, courtyards, and corridors that preserve their atmosphere intact, marked by the suffering and memory of all the people who were imprisoned, condemned, and even executed during Franco's regime. This year, this historical burden is complemented by the historical theater show El fil vermell, which recovers the voices of the women who experienced firsthand the Francoist institution of the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer.
Among all the metropolitan municipalities, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat stands out especially this year with the expansion of its program and the incorporation of two new spaces: the La Bòbila Cultural Center and the La Florida 6.0 Digital Transformation Center, which add outdoor concerts and tours to discover the urban art that permeates the streets. A commitment that reflects the evolution of Museum Night itself, increasingly open to hybrid formats and participatory experiences, where facilities cease to be just exhibition spaces to become places of experimentation.
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