Free Museums
In Barcelona, museums aren't usually free, but since 2009 the city council has promoted a proposal to open museums for free on the first Sunday of each month, and that has sparked public interest. Maybe if it's free and you don't like it, it's no big deal.
I know, museums can sometimes be boring and it's not an activity for everyone, but when you actually pay attention and show a bit of interest, you can discover amazing stories and surprises, just like I did last Sunday.
In the center of Barcelona, there’s a neighborhood called El Born, which has an old market that is now a museum. I used to walk past it all the time and never went in, but thanks to the free Sunday, I finally entered and read its signs telling the story, I'll summarize it really quickly.
In the late 1870s, an iron market was built in El Born. It lasted for 100 years until it was closed in the 1970s. In the 2000s, they wanted to turn the building into something else, like a museum or a library, and when they started digging to reinforce the foundations, guess what they found? The ruins of an old medieval neighborhood from the 1700s!
They were hidden for many years beneath a market? That’s incredible. How many generations lived there without knowing what was under their feet?
That’s it. Just a small piece of Spanish history I learned for free.