22/11/2018 – Visit to the Martorell Museum (Natural History Museum of Barcelona) for our 4th Informative Talk

Last 22 nd of November, we visited the Martorell Museum, which is part of the Natural History Museum of Barcelona. We were received by Yousra Haddad Belfkih, member of our Student Chapter, together with Yael Díaz, Marc Campeny and Vicent Vicedo, who are responsible for the petrological, mineralogical and paleontological collections. Yousra is doing an internship at the Museum documenting the petrological collection. To start the visit, they told us that the Museum was built thanks to the legacy that Francesc Martorell i Peña (1822-1878) left to the city of Barcelona in 1878. The Museum has been exclusively dedicated to geological collections since 1924. Then we were able to visit all the facilities. First, Vicent talked about the amount, storage and selection of the paleontological pieces. With Marc, we learnt about the preservation of geological samples and some important safety aspects during the conservation process. Finally, Yael showed us the library, which is specialized in the scientific disciplines of the Museum, the petrography laboratory, and how the team works with historical databases in order to adapt them to new technologies: http://www.bioexplora.cat/ncd/. We also did a small practice cataloging rocks and minerals under the guidance of David Fernández.

We would like to thank the entire team of the Museum for such a warm welcome and for their great predisposition to show us the daily work in the field of conservation and divulgation of geological heritage. If you want to know more about the museum, follow this link: https://museuciencies.cat/en/el-nat/las-sedes/museo-martorell/