Image: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona is offering a day of weekend programming that combines guided visits, family activities and access to its public spaces. According to the museum’s ‘Cap de setmana MNAC’ schedule, Saturday, July 25, includes commentary on the Palau Nacional’s architecture and memory, a highlights tour of the collection, and an afternoon workshop centered on hats.
The programme is part of the museum’s regular weekend offer, which the site says includes guided visits, art walks, open creative spaces and temporary exhibitions. The listed Saturday session begins at 11.30 am with ‘El Palau Nacional. Arquitectura i memòria’, presented in Spanish. The visit is designed to take participants through some of the building’s most emblematic spaces while placing them in the historical, urban, political and cultural context of Barcelona in the 1920s and the 1929 International Exposition.
The museum says the visit also addresses the creation of the museum in 1934 and the building’s later transformations up to the present day. The route is set to pass through the vestibule, Oval Hall, Sert Hall, the Dome Hall, the Restaurant Àbsis and the terraces. A parallel 11.30 am session in English, followed by a 12.30 pm Catalan version, presents ‘Col·lecció MNAC. The highlights’, an hour-long guided tour of selected works from the collection.
That collection tour moves through the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, and Modern Art galleries. The museum frames it as a summer invitation to discover the collection’s essentials, combining art with the site’s views and hospitality offer. On Sunday, July 26, the same ‘The highlights’ visit is scheduled again, with versions in English and Spanish.
Later on Saturday, from 5 pm to 7.30 pm, the museum is offering a workshop titled ‘Tants caps, tants barrets’ in the Oval Hall. The activity uses portraits from the Renaissance and Baroque collection as a starting point for making a personal hat, with participants encouraged to reinterpret the hats seen in the images and take their creation home. The museum says the workshop highlights the hat as a socially distinctive element in portrait imagery.
Alongside the day’s guided sessions, MNAC is keeping open a family creativity area and reading-and-play corner in the Sala Oval from 10 am to 8 pm on Saturday, and from 10 am to 3 pm on Sunday. The museum describes the space as one for reading, dialogue, rest and play, and notes that the weekend programme also includes self-guided visits, temporary exhibitions and other autonomous activities. The weekend schedule is presented on the museum’s ‘Cap de setmana MNAC’ page for Barcelona’s Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.
