Mataró Museum

Mataró’s museum is not a building. It is four of them, scattered across the town: a Renaissance merchant’s manor, a Roman villa with mosaic floors, an art centre built on a painter’s bequest, and a red-brick knitwear factory that once supplied more knitted fabric than anywhere else in Spain. Buying one ticket and expecting one museum is the standard mistake.

Can Serra: the headquarters

The main site is Can Serra, the manor house of Jeroni Serra Arnau, built in 1565 in a restrained Catalan Renaissance style. Its voussoir doorway and moulded window frames are the exterior draw; inside, much of the original wood panelling survives. The town council bought the house in 1915 and handed it to the museum, which finally opened there in 1942 — nearly half a century after the museum itself was founded in 1894, following six years of lobbying by Mataró’s Artistic-Archaeological Association. The permanent display runs the town’s story from Roman Iluro through the medieval and modern town.

Can Marfa and the knitwear that made the town

The branch that gives the museum its distinctive subject is Can Marfa, an 1880s factory complex in what Catalans call the Manchester style: two three-storey brick warehouses joined by bridges, with a chimney between them. Before 1936 the Marfa works was the largest knitted-fabric factory in Spain. The smaller warehouse now holds the Jaume Vilaseca Foundation collection — machinery, garments, tools, advertising and documents — presented as Mataró, capital of knitwear. It is among the most significant industrial collections of its kind in Europe, and it was assembled largely by people who had worked in the industry as it declined.

The Roman villa and the art centre

The third site is the Torre Llauder archaeological enclosure, the excavated state rooms of a Roman villa outside the Roman city of Iluro that lies beneath modern Mataró: mosaic floors, a hypocaust, a full bath sequence of caldarium, tepidarium and frigidarium, and two peristyle courtyards. It was found in 1961 by the local archaeologist Maria Ribas i Bertran and declared a national monument three years later. The fourth site, Ca l’Arenas, came from the painter Jordi Arenas i Clavell’s legacy to his home town and concentrates on art made in and about Mataró.

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