Nachrichten, Angebote und Neuigkeiten

Vera remains the pioneer in Almería province for the creation of original museums. In fact, Vera boasts a dozen themed centres, which house and preserve the area’s historical, cultural, ethnographic, archaeological, convent heritage, and a long list of etcs. And the Town Hall, through its Culture, Tourism and Sports is going to great efforts to promote the museums, under the management of a grand professional with a long and prestigious career in the province, the historian-archaeologist Domingo Ortiz Soler as Director of Municipal Historic Museum Projects.

Vera aims to remain a reference point as the “Museums Town”. What’s more, the current Government team is planning “the continuation of the creation of new museum centres, such as a themed hiking route, turning the open-air into a museum, with all the elements of heritage interest found along they way: archaeological, places and landscapes of historical, geographical and natural interest, backed up with information panels and the restoration of said elements to make them of museum value”, explains Domingo Ortiz. Adds the historian-archaeologist, it is “a new, novel way to make a museum of the landscapes and its contents heritage prints, in this way informing residents and visitors about the cultural heritage of the people of Vera. An effective way to attach value to the heritage to raise awareness about respecting and preserving it at an important part of the municipality’s cultural and tourism heritage and to develop socio-cultural and sports activities, with the consequent creation of jobs and wealth.”

Vera’s line up of museums is: the Museums of Professional Trades; the Ethno-Archaeological Theme Park; the prehistoric cabin; the Victoria Convent Museum; the Medieval City of Bayra Visitors’ Centre; the Cuatro Caños Fountain Municipal Hydraulic-Laundry Complex and Water Culture Visitors Centre; the Bullfighting Museum; the Rural Habitat Visitors Centre; the Open-Air Museum Space; the Roman Road; the Levante Marine Paleontological Visitors Centre; Museum of Marine Fossils; and the Open-Air Contemporary Sculpture Museum.

History Pioneer

Domingo Ortiz knows Vera’s museum history very well, because it was him who first backed the developments and who brought it to where it is today. He recalls that the first museum in Almería was the one he set up at the Vera Institute at the beginning of the 1970s in a hall next to the library.

“It was a small archaeological hall which we set up with archaeological materials from the Levante region”, he explains.

In those days, the museum was seen as such a novelty and so important that “the TVE programme ‘Rescue Mission’ was interested in it for being the first museum, and they did a report and interviews. What we were doing then was to create in the municipalities – the teachers with the students – small investigation groups to study local history through the archaeological sites.”

Following this first, pioneering experience, in 1975 Vera Town Hall ceded a small room in the building which had been the court, and it was there that the first municipal, and provincial museum, was located. In 1984 this was transferred to what is today the museum on the ground floor of the Town Hall, though days organized by the local authority’s Historical Archive, and titled “Vera, rebuild your history.”

In 1988, as part of the 5^th Centenary of the Capitulation of Year, (1488-1988), “I expanded the museum, with more archaeological halls, and another for ethnography, of trades and of popular traditions”, the historian remembers. A year later, the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva (Switzerland), asked the Vera Museum to exhibit its ethnographic show there, together with the exhibition project about esparto grass which was directed by the anthropologist Pedro Molina, the current rector of the University of Almería. And so Vera went to Geneva for three months through its ethnographic museum. “And on returning from Geneva I found it closed…”

In Vera’s museum history there is a large lagoon in which it was closed, from 1989 to 1999, the year in which Domingo Ortiz was brought back on board for its reopening. “And from that time until today, I have not stopped proposing new museum area projects, with the conviction of the need, not only to preserve and find out about local and regional history, but also as an alternative means of creating wealth,” points out Ortiz.