The Barcelona City Council approves the creation of the Geological Garden at the doors of the Faculty of Earth Sciences
The Barcelona City Council approves the creation of the Geological Garden at the doors of the Faculty of Earth Sciences
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News|Culture|Institutional|Divulgation
(13/01/2025)
The Barcelona City Council’s Governing Committee has given the green light to the creation of the Geological Garden on the areas that belong to the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Earth Sciences. Specifically, the museum will be located in Carrer Menéndez Pelayo, in the district of Les Corts, and will be the first street museum in the city of Barcelona.
News|Culture|Institutional|Divulgation
13/01/2025
The Barcelona City Council’s Governing Committee has given the green light to the creation of the Geological Garden on the areas that belong to the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Earth Sciences. Specifically, the museum will be located in Carrer Menéndez Pelayo, in the district of Les Corts, and will be the first street museum in the city of Barcelona.
This action has a budget of 1.2 million euros, funded with Next Generation funds, and the works are expected to begin in the summer of 2025. The Geological Garden will be an educational and informative space on the fields of geology and earth sciences, which will house different natural materials, exhibits and information elements. It will have a surface area of approximately 1,830 m².
Parts of the Geological Garden
The Geological Garden will have four different exhibition areas:
Area 1. “Geological time”: this will be carried out on the pavement to represent geological time and will be constructed with different natural materials that were formed in the various geological stages over more than half a billion years. This route will be accompanied by a series of large rocks, in their raw state, right next to the flowerbeds, related to the corresponding temporal stages.
Area 2. “The Earth”: a door to knowledge will be created in one of the staircases leading to the Faculty of Earth Sciences, with a carpet that will introduce visitors to the internal structure of the Earth. There will be a representation of the layers of the globe, built with materials representing these layers.
Area 3. “The geological wall. Corte Ecors”: a cut of the Earth’s crust in our geographical area in order to show the internal structure of the subsoil, will be represented on the main stairway of the Faculty. The wall will be a piece of 20 m long, 40 cm wide and of variable height between 0.85 and 1.30 m, positioned diagonally in the square so that it allows a natural flow of people towards the access stairway.
Area 4. “Applications and processes”: this part will be located opposite the UB’s Faculty of Biology and will explain the applications of geology and natural materials throughout the history of mankind, with a view to the future. It aims to occupy the space next to one of the flowerbeds with a pavement that rises and folds in the form of dunes, thus allowing the materials that symbolise the resources used for the technological development of society over time to be exhibited to come to the surface.
The idea of creating a geological garden in front of the entrance to the Faculty of Earth Sciences was initially born under the UB’s Knowledge Portal concept, an initiative brought by the Dean of the Faculty of that time, Miquel Àngel Cuevas Diarte. The project for the museum space of the Geological Garden was designed by the RFArq Arquitectos studio, under the direction of Eliana Crubellati Benedetti, and Jordi Vives Arumí, museologist and science communicator, for the museology part.
