Railway Museum of Catalonia

Once a month, a working replica of Spain’s very first locomotive still leaves its shed and runs under its own steam — the same “La Mataró” that opened the Costa de Maresme’s Barcelona-Mataró line in 1848, the first railway ever built on the Iberian Peninsula.

A depot abandoned twice before it was finally saved

The museum occupies a genuine former steam locomotive depot in Vilanova i la Geltrú, its oldest buildings dating to 1881, the year the town’s own rail connection to Barcelona opened. The depot served as a working maintenance base until its closure in 1967, after which it was simply locked up — its retired locomotives left sitting untouched over the pits and inside the semicircular roundhouse. A brief 1972 revival, prompted by an international railway modellers’ congress, restored some vehicles for the event — only for the whole site to be abandoned again once the visitors left. It took until 1990, on the back of renewed interest around the railway line’s 1981 centenary, for the depot to finally reopen as a proper museum.

The centrepiece still runs

Among more than sixty vehicles from multiple countries and eras, the collection’s genuine star is a working replica of La Mataró, the locomotive that opened Spain’s first railway line between Barcelona and Mataró in 1848. Unlike most museum pieces, it isn’t purely static: on the first Sunday of every month, the replica is fired up and driven along the museum grounds to the Crane Bridge track, giving visitors a genuinely rare chance to see 19th-century rail technology actually operating rather than simply displayed behind glass.

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