





By José Pardo-Tomás, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científica, Spain
When we think about the Salvador collection some aspects stand out. The first one is that it’s a collection that has been in the hands of the same family since its foundation – in the first half of the 17th century – until it was acquired and converted into a scientific heritage of Barcelona’s city, already in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this long process, the collection went through different stages, through some transformations and resignifications, that accompanied the interests and aspirations of the heir responsible for it at the moment. In this sense, we can divide this history in three phases: the first, of formation and consolidation of the cabinet; the second, the reconfiguration of the cabinet as a museum in 19th century and, finally, the resurgence of the cabinet as a heritage asset in 21st century.
The accidental premature death of José Salvador (the last active member of the dynasty) in 1855 brought some time after to the closure of the museum at Barcelona. Around 1870, the cabinet and all its contents (furniture, library, naturalia and artificialia pieces) were moved to one of the many countryside properties of the family. Nothing was heard about the cabinet until 1923 when two curators of the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences established contact with the owners. But the negotiations for trying to recover the scientific collections for the public failed.
In 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, Republican Catalan Government issued a decree by which Salvador collection had to be incorporated into the public heritage and deposited in the Botanical Institute of Barcelona, which had been created four years earlier, as a dependence of the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences. At the end of 1945, the Barcelona City Council acquired the Salvador legacy and allowed for some dissemination of the existence of the collection, mainly of the herbarium, the most highly valued piece by the botanists of the Institute. But the constant funding problems during the Franco’s dictatorship and a large part of the democratic transition period, together with certain weaknesses in the institutional insertion of the Botanical Institute considerably delayed a proper cataloguing of the collection and a museum project to bring the collection to the public.
Until the end of the 20th century, only a few scholars had accessed the collection and documents of the Salvador family. Some effort to popularize the history of the cabinet and searching for funding and institutional support in order to return it to the public in a way that would ensure its proper conservation and use was made but with scarce success. Based on the new agreement between the CSIC (Spanish Scientific Research Council) and the Barcelona City Council, it was decided to erect a new building for the Botanical Institute, inaugurated in 2003. Here, finally Salvador Collection had to have its own space in the best conditions of conservation and, at the same time, open to viewing by the public. Finally, in the Spring of 2014 opened the exhibition Salvadoriana: the cabinet of curiosities of Barcelona, which remained open until May 2016 in the large room adjacent to the Salvador Room in the Botanical Institute, where the restored cabinet was exhibited and is still exhibited today.
Salvadoriana was born as a project which gave its first step cataloguing and restoring the pieces of the collection. In fact, all the pieces (more than 15,000 items) were restored using the most appropriate technical and scientific criteria: respect for the original, minimum intervention, compatibility of added materials, reversibility of the treatments and graphic documentation of the entire process. Hundreds of pieces were dry-cleaned and permanently wrapped, complete specimens were restored and the contents of the drawers of the original cabinets were cleaned and mounted. Furthermore, the polychrome doors of the original cabinets were restored, together with the material from the most recent find.
This long and often winding road to get here poses several challenges. There is still much work to be done in the museography for exhibit the collection to different public maybe in different spaces (both virtual or real). As well as there is still much work to be done in the field of the and scientific and historical research. The documents of the family archive, a large part of the correspondence, the evolution of the family’s business and its relation to scientific practices, the visitors to the cabinet before and after its conversion in Museo Salvador between 1830 and 1870, the connection of the Salvador cabinet of curiosities with the collections of the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences, etc. Above all, when thinking about the participation of different kinds of natural history collections in a “regional” or “provincial” city as Barcelona, putting together with other European case studies in a project such as SciCoMove.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (July 7, 2021). The Salvador collection in Barcelona. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved February 19, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twrd