By Neus Ibáñez, Museu Ciencies Naturals Barcelona (Institut Botanic de Barcelona), Spain
The Salvador family was a well-known family of apothecaries from Barcelona who developed their work around naturalism between the 17th and 19th centuries. They collected samples in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Balearic Islands while keeping correspondence and exchanging books and objects with important European naturalists of the time, such as Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, James Petiver, Herman Booerhave, and the Jussieu brothers.

As a result of the intense work of various generations, the Salvador family created a scientific cabinet in the back room of their old pharmacy in Barcelona. It comprised a magnificent library, herbarium, handwritten documents, collections of molluscs, fossils, drugs, and several pieces of vegetables and stuffed animals.
In the 19th century, the cabinet was moved to the family’s villa (masia) in the Penedès district where it remained unnoticed until Pius Font i Quer found it in 1923. Following this discovery, the efforts of the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (IBB) focused on moving the collection to its premises, which occurred between 1938 and 1945. Nevertheless, parts of the cabinet had still been lost.
In 2013, during the preparation of the exhibition Salvadoriana, the Exhibition Department of the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona found a part of the collection that was unknown until then. In the summer of 2013, the City Council of Barcelona purchased and moved it to the IBB facilities to reunite the newly discovered items with the rest of the collection.
In 2014, the collection was catalogued, all the materials were reviewed and restored, and preventive conservation measures were carried out. That same year, both Catalan and Spanish Governments granted the entire Salvador Collection the highest level of protection (“Heritage of Cultural Interest”). Finally, the history of the Cabinet and the family that assembled it was shown in the Salvadoriana temporary exhibition that took place from 2014 to 2016 at the IBB, where the Cabinet can be visited nowadays.

What is worth highlighting in this collection is its herbarium, the oldest known in Spain, consisting of samples collected in the 17th and 18th centuries. A total of 4,917 specimens have survived to this day, and these are mainly plants collected by Joan Salvador and his father, Jaume. They were collected in Catalonia, the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, Europe, the Salvador family’s botanical garden in Sant Joan Despí, and other botanical gardens around Europe. There is even an odd American plant grown in these gardens. The collectors carefully wrote down the origins of all specimens, and this precision regarding the geographic location allows the scientific use of the Salvador’s herbarium up to the present time.
The importance of the Salvador collection lies in the fact that, unlike most contemporary European collections, it was not dismantled piece by piece, destroyed by traumatic events, or subsumed by larger royal or university collections. Even more outstanding is that the collection has come down to us accompanied by a library, documents, letters, furniture, and specimens’ labels, all preserved in their original format.
To know more
Visit the Botanical Garden of Barcelona (JBB). For security reasons and to ensure proper preservation, the collection must be observed through the security glass protecting it. The visit is included in the entrance ticket.
Listen to a podcast. Produced in 2016 with the aim of bringing together in a single document all the work carried out in order to adapt the Cabinet material and have it inventoried for the Salvadoriana exhibition.
Read the Manual Salvador. A compilation of all the work carried out on the Salvador collection published in 2019 within the collection Manuals del Museu.
Visit the digital exhibition. Published in April 2020 on the platform Museu Obert it presents all the specimens and the main fields of each object in a very visual way.
Bibliograhy
Bolòs, A. 1946. El Herbario Salvador. Collectanea Botanica (Barcelona) 1: 1–8. Digital.CSIC
Bolòs, A. 1947. Plantas montserratinas de Juan Salvador. Collectanea Botanica (Barcelona) 1: 323–329. Digital.CSIC
Romo, A. M. 1995. Un herbario prelinneano en el Institut Botànic de Barcelona: el herbario Salvador. Boletín AHIM 0: 4–5. Digital.CSIC
Ibáñez. N. 2006. Estudis sobre cinc herbaris històrics de l’Institut Botànic de Barcelona. Doctoral thesis. Universitat de Barcelona. Digital.CSIC
Camarasa, J. M. & Ibáñez, N. 2007. Joan Salvador and James Petiver: a scientific correspondence (1706–1714) in time of war. Archives of Natural History 34 (1): 140–173. Digital.CSIC
Camarasa, J. M. & Ibáñez, N. 2012. Joan Salvador and James Petiver: the last years (1715–1718) of their scientific correspondence. Archives of Natural History 39 (2): 191–216. Digital.CSIC
Ibáñez, N. 2014. Inauguració de l’exposició Salvadoriana. Collectanea Botanica (Barcelona) 33: 9. Digital.CSIC
Pérez, M., Muñoz, O., Hervás, N., Ibáñez, N., Aurell-Garrido, J. & Garcia-Franquesa, E. 2015. El Gabinete de Historia Natural Salvador: intervenciones de conservación preventiva y curativa e inventario preliminar. Boletín de la Real Sociedad Española de Historia Natural 2: 87–99. Digital.CSIC
Gavioli, L. 2016. Reunir totes les plantes de Catalunya: adquisició de 5 herbaris de l’Institut Botànic de Barcelona a través de les cartes de Pius Font i Quer. Master thesis. Història de la Ciència: Ciència, Història i Societat. Digital.CSIC
Nualart, N. & Ibáñez, N. 2016. Las colecciones históricas del Herbario BC (Instituto Botánico de Barcelona). Boletín de la Asociación de Herbarios Iberico-Macaronésicos 17 : 10–18. Digital.CSIC
Ibáñez, N., Camarasa, J.M. & Garcia-Franquesa, E. (coord.) 2019. El gabinet Salvador: Un tresor científic recuperat / El gabinete Salvador: un tesoro científico recuperado. Manuals del Museu 2. Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona, Barcelona, 303 pp. Digital.CSIC
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (June 4, 2021). Salvador’s Cabinet of Curiosities. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved March 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twr6