The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, universally the MNAC, fills the Palau Nacional built for the 1929 exposition at the top of the great stair on Montjuïc.
Its Romanesque collection is the reason it matters: the largest body of Romanesque mural painting anywhere, stripped off the walls of Pyrenean churches in the 1920s to stop it being sold abroad. How it got here is the best story in the building.
The museum is about to be rebuilt. An expansion project was presented in March 2026: it rehabilitates Puig i Cadafalch's neighbouring Palau Victòria Eugènia and joins it to the Palau Nacional by a covered passage, taking the museum from about 49,000 to over 71,000 square metres and allowing permanent display of post-1940s art, photography and comics for the first time.
The consequence for visitors is that the museum is expected to close at least partly during 2027, with no temporary exhibitions from that year and the new museum targeted for late 2029. Whether the Romanesque galleries themselves will shut has not been stated. Anyone travelling from 2027 onwards should check before building a day around it.
This is not a story of collecting. It is a rescue, and a controversial one.
In the summer of 1919 the museums board learned that the apse paintings of the church of Santa Maria de Mur, in a remote Pyrenean valley, had been bought and physically stripped from the wall, and were on their way to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They could not stop it. What followed was a systematic campaign, running from 1919 to 1923, to remove the murals from the Romanesque churches of the Catalan Pyrenees and bring them to Barcelona before dealers did.
The work was driven by the museums board and by the museum's director Joaquim Folch i Torres, and carried out by the workshop of an Italian restorer, Franco Steffanoni. The technique was strappo: cloth glued to the painted surface and then pulled away, lifting the thin skin of pigment and leaving the plaster behind on the wall. In Barcelona the paint films were fixed to new supports shaped to reproduce the curve of the apses they came from, which is why the galleries feel like a street of churches rather than a picture hang.
The churches themselves — including Sant Climent de Taüll, whose Pantocrator is the most famous image in the collection — now show replicas. Whether it was right to take them is still argued about in the valleys. What is not in doubt is that the alternative was Boston.
The collection runs chronologically and the sequence is Romanesque, then Gothic, then Renaissance and Baroque, then the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Older accounts list the order as Romanesque, Gothic and then "the medieval period", which is the same thing twice.
The Palau Nacional was thrown up for the 1929 exposition and was never meant to last; it has a vast domed oval hall at its centre, used for concerts. The museum has occupied it since 1934 and it was comprehensively reworked in the 1990s.
Two rooftop viewpoints reopened in August 2023 and are included in the admission ticket: a footbridge some twenty metres up between the towers and domes, running from a viewpoint over the Avinguda Maria Cristina to a second one above the Palauet Albéniz gardens. It is one of the best views in the city and most visitors do not know it exists. It is not accessible to anyone with reduced mobility.
The terrace in front of the building, at the top of the stair, is free to anyone and is where to be at sunset.
Entry is charged, with free admission on Saturday afternoons and the first Sunday of each month, which is also when it is busiest. Closed on Mondays. The Font Màgica plays below the building on set evenings — see the Montjuïc page, because it is dark more often than visitors expect.
General practicalities for the city are on the Barcelona page.