National Museum of Architecture opens its doors in Salamanca in 2009

The Salamanca Head Office of the National Museum of Architecture will open its doors in 2009, after the adaption of the historic building, the Banco de España, in the centre of the city.

This is how the Housing Minister, Maria Antonia Trujillo explained it, acompanied by the Employment Minister, Jesús Caldera, reminding that the Government invested 20 million euros in this project.

Trujillo emphasized in a press conference that the future National Museum of Architecture and Urbanism (MAU), which will divide its Head Offices between Salamanca, dedicated to Architecture, and Barcelona for the Urban section; ´intends to sensitise the citizens to the necessity of preserving this type of heritage as an element of cultural identity´.

The museum ´will be as much conventional as virtual´, since it will be provided with the most modern systems of study and cataloguing artifacts, as much in the museum´s head offices as in its Documentation Centre, according to Trujillo.

For the ministry, the election of Salamanca as the Head Office of the National Museum of Architecture vouches for the fact that the city is ´a mark of urban representation´ in that it joins a multitude of styles, and on top of that for being Heritage of Humanity since 1988¨

Nowadays Spain is ´one of the few western countries´, emphasised Trujillo, which does not have a museum of Architecture, with its creation, ´the goverment settled a historical debt with our urban and cultural heritage.´

For his part, Jesús Caldera pointed out that if there is one city that for its ´history and characteristics deserves the construction of a museum of architecture, it should be Salamanca.´