The Museo de Huelva

The Museo Provincial de Huelva is located at the Alameda Sundheim Avenue – one of the most emblematic streets in the city, where the high bourgeoisie used to live and have their wintertime promenades during the first decades of the 20th century. The Museum was opened in 1973, giving the city a cultural site where people could see from the archaeological, prehistorical discoveries of Huelva to the latest art works of the 20th century, such as paintings by artists Daniel Vázquez Díaz or José Caballero Muñoz-Caballero.

The building was planned by architect Lorenzo Martín Nieto from Seville, who also restored the Hermit of San Pedro and the Museo de Artes y Costumbres Populares in the town of Aracena, Huelva. Martín Nieto avoided every architectural excessiveness and presented a harmonious, Andalusian-like building with Mudejar hints in the grills and gardens at the entrance – following the theories of the moment, the gardens would be a vegetal screen to protect the building and the art works inside.

The Museum has three floors and a semi-basement and consists of three main sections – Archaeology, Fine Arts, and Temporal expositions.

The most visited, best-known hall in the Museum is the permanent exhibition hall of Archaeology, where you can see Palaeolithic and Neolithic rests – including the Bronze Age and the findings in the hills known as ‘Cabezo de la Joya’ and ‘Cabezo de San Pedro’ – in different chronological sections.

This exhibition hall gives a remarkable importance to the findings belonging to the Tartessos culture. With the title ‘Tartessos, from myth to reality’, the section shows a historical chronology of Tartessian Andalusia and other civilizations – the Phoenicians and the Greeks – of the same period. The ground floor also shows a Roman waterwheel known as the ‘Noria de Riotinto’ (‘Riotinto Watermill’), which starts a new archaeological period in the Museum.

The first floor has the exhibition halls belonging to the Fine Arts section. One of them is the permanent exhibition hall, with paintings and sculptures from the thirteenth to the twentieth century.

The second floor is for private usage, whereas the semi-basement holds the maintenance areas and the store of archaeological rests.