More than 90 museums open until dawn: from Roman ruins to techno

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.

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.

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.