The Frederic Marès Museum starts off like it’s going to be normal. Respectable. A few ancient figures from antiquity, some saints carved in stone, an ungodly number of crucifixes.
Then you go upstairs and realize you’ve been had. The whole thing is a slow-burn punchline—Barcelona’s most elaborate museum prank. Because what’s waiting on the upper floors is one of the most overwhelming personal collections in Europe —a sprawling catalog of particular interests, such as pipes, hand fans, keys, matchboxes, and about a thousand other things that no sane person would think to catalog.
Marès—born in 1893 on the French border in Portbou—grew to be one of the city's most respected sculptors. He received his first public commission at 26, and before long, his work was popping up all over Barcelona as civic monuments, allegorical figures, and restoration projects. His sculptures grace the grand stairway up to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and frame the Plaça de Catalunya. His work was classical, monumental, and designed to last.
He also taught at the university for decades, well into the 1960s. The steady paycheck funded his real passion—collecting. Like many great hoarders, he started young. By 1946, his collection outgrew his own home, and he had to rent display space. By the 1970s, it had become the full-blown museum we have today. Even so, he kept going right up until he died at nearly 100 in 1991, his legacy more firmly attached to what he saved than to what he created. He left everything to the city, which resulted in the creation of this singular museum.
Outside, it looks like a modest annex to the cathedral—which it sort of is. It occupies part of the Palau Reial Major, an 11th-century royal residence that housed the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Catalonia and Aragon. One façade bears a worn coat of arms carved into the stone, the only visible reminder of its time as the Spanish Inquisition's headquarters. This is also where Columbus showed off the souvenirs from his first boat trip to Ferdinand and Isabella.
The layout is as unpredictable as the collection. You start on the ground floor, circling a central courtyard, then dip down a half-flight into cryptlike galleries before climbing up—sometimes confusedly—through a tangle of staircases and blind corners. I doubled back more than once after realizing I’d skipped entire rooms. Luckily, the staff were friendly and gently watchful, like they’d seen this before. Which they obviously had. The lower levels are reverently crammed with religious sculpture: crucifixions, pietàs, saints, martyrs, madonnas—you name it, it’s here. Dozens. Hundreds. So many they start to blend into sacred wallpaper—poignant, symbolic, and quietly surreal.
But taken in context, it’s extraordinary. If the national museum has the frescoes rescued from crumbling Pyrenean churches and glued back onto walls, Marès has all the more portable bits—carved sculptures, wooden madonnas, and elaborate altarpieces. Between the two institutions, Barcelona could easily reassemble several complete medieval churches. Exactly how some of the more monumental pieces—like the full stone arches in the basement—ended up in private hands is probably a tale worth telling. I assume it includes salvage, luck, and the occasional well-timed check.
Still, it’s clear Marès genuinely cared about this specific tradition of local sacred art. You get the sense he thought he was saving it—from neglect, from war, from obscurity. And here, on the first couple of floors, it all feels…normal.
The top floor is where the wheels come off. It’s called the Collector’s Cabinet, though the name is wildly inadequate. Cabinets suggest restraint. Limits. Instead, you’ll find 17 rooms filled with the things Marès collected obsessively, privately, and unapologetically to create what he called “a museum of sentimental life.” These were objects designed to be held, gifted, worn, smoked, tucked into corsets or waistcoats. Now? They sit under glass, pinned upright and lit like jewelry.
Each room offers a period-accurate avalanche of bourgeois accessories. Fans, combs, lace collars, snuffboxes, opera glasses, matchbox labels, rosaries, miniature portraits, cigar clippers. The Smokers’ Room contained dozens of display cases filled with carved pipes, ashtrays, and cigarette holders, along with wall-mounted flip panels stacked with hundreds of vintage matchbox covers. In one rack alone, I counted 16 frames, each with more than 80 labels.
There were keys. Hundreds of them. Cigar bands. Bedwarmers. Helmets. Tiny saints made from seashells. A dizzying array of clocks. You don’t just look at this stuff, you get dragged down into it. Objects that were once tossed aside as tacky or overfamiliar become, in aggregate, something stranger and more compelling—fragments of fashion, tools of forgotten habits, tiny orphans of taste. They sketch out the world they came from, its preoccupations, its vanities, its weird little hobbies.
The more you pay attention, the more eccentric you feel. If you linger, if you really let yourself dig, the place rewards you. This is a meta-collection. A collection of collections. Not just a sculptor’s private hoard, but a shrine to the very act of saving things that most people let slip away.
The place is intentionally unsolvable, I think. It dares you to focus, then laughs at your attempt. You could pick a single category—say, carved ivory snuff spoons—and spend an entire day tracing their placement across rooms, styles, and decades. And even then, you’d miss things. You’d miss a lot.
But I don’t think Marès wanted you to “learn” anything. Not in the traditional, museum-label sense. More personal than didactic. His own sculptures—elegant, classical figures—barely register once you’ve crossed into the upper floors. Because his real project wasn’t marble. It was memory. Memory made physical, multiplied, and archived like a catalog of vanished touch.
Some museums tell you who someone was. The Frederic Marès Museum lets you feel it. The quiet devotion. The emotional clutter. The impossibility of letting anything meaningful go.
I’ll take that over another crucifix any day. And I say that with deep respect for Crucifix No. 238 downstairs.
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