Hoya de Huesca has several museums and exhibition areas displaying a variety of different themes:
Nature: The ARCAZ Birds of Prey Exhibition Centre in Riglos; the Naturalist Museum “House of the Vultures” in Santa Cilia de Panzano; the Exhibition Centre “Los Altos de Guara” in the same locality; the Migratory Bird Exhibition Centre "Alberca de Alboré” in Montmesa.
Art: Huesca Museum: The permanent collection is divided into two sections: Archaeology and Fine Arts. Also in Huesca is the Contemporary Arts Centre - Beulas Foundation “CDAN”, a reference location for issues relating to art and nature.
Ethnography: Museum d´o Segallo in Agüero; the Museum of Costume, Fans and Footwear in Alerre; the “Santas” Ethnological Museum in Bolea; the "O´Molín de Yeste" Nature Museum in Yeste; the Electricity Museum in Murillo de Gállego; the Exhibition Centre of the Vine, Wineries and Wine "El Bodegón" in Almudévar; the Molino de El Viñedo in Castilsabás; and the Ceramics Museum in Bandaliés.
Education: Pedagogical Museum of Aragon in Huesca and the Rural School Museum in Linás de Marcuello.
Religion: Diocesan Museum in Huesca; the Parish Museums in Almudévar and Alcalá de Gurrea; and the Organ Museum in Agüero.
Ethnological museum taking its name from the name of the house. Most of the objects displayed are treasures handed down through the same family:
Gramophones, radios, spinning machines, stuffers, siphons, coffee grinders, over a thousand old photos, books, watches, keys, rattles, switches, coins and banknotes... almost a thousand objects. There is also an area dedicated to cooking, with the range, four traditional wooden chairs and even a table set with tablecloths, plates and silverware. Also wedding regalia, baby clothes and other delicate items.
Located in the Casa Abadía (Abbey House), the objects and pieces on display are divided into four rooms. You can admire the various components that every organ has: the pipes, keys carved in boxwood or ivory; mechanisms specific to an organ, such as valves, winches, handles, pulleys, springs and special wooden panels (with holes of different diameters to hold the different size pipes).
An exhibition of different types of footwear and fans, and their strong cultural ties in Spain
The modest but very interesting Diocesan Museum of Alcalá de Gurrea is located in the lower choir of the Parish Church of San Jorge, where a number of sacred works of art and various religious liturgical motifs can be seen.
Housed in the old water tanks, a review of the history of the locality and its traditional crops is given, which focuses on the vine and the winemaking process, and includes many old tools, photographs, panels and a model of a wine cellar.
The Museum of Sacred Art at Almudévar can be found inside the parish church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Our Lady of the Assumption), and occupies several rooms with a large number of pieces of art of all kinds: vestments, paintings and altarpieces from the XV and XVI centuries, as well as numerous pieces of silverware. They all come from the parish church and the shrine of the Virgen de La Corona.
Located in the family home where Santiago Ramón y Cajal lived during his childhood and youth; with old photos, items from that time, texts and audiovisual commentaries telling his life story and the scientific achievements leading to his Nobel Prize.
The Santas family in Bolea bought the house at number 14, Calle Castilla to turn it into an ethnological museum. The rooms in the building must be viewed from outside their respective doors, for security reasons and also because of the many very valuable objects displayed in each room.
The upper floors contain the room used for sewing and ironing clothes, the sitting room, the study area with games for the children, the kitchen, dining room, office and others. In the back of the house, there is a wine press, ploughs and other farm implements.
CDAN is configured as a living space, open to the city of Huesca and visitors, with art and nature as its fulcrum. The Centre for Art and Nature offers a regular programme of activities focused on its double collection, on nature, the public space, artistic creation and contemporary culture, while promoting new reflections in these areas.
The goal of the Beulas Foundation is to make the CDAN a reference point for the study itineraries of contemporary art; to create an artistic centre capable of portraying the image of Huesca as a contemporary international location for its specialisation on singular themes in art and nature.
The Diocesan Museum in Huesca houses one of the finest collections of religious art in Aragon. It is located inside the gothic cathedral dedicated to the Saviour and St Peter, and came about in 1945 following the need to house the so-called Cathedral Treasury, containing important items from there as well as other churches in the diocese. Over time, changes will occur in the location of the museum, and currently the collections are arranged into three architectural areas: the Hall and Foyer Chapter for the gold and silver ware, the cloisters for paintings and medieval sculpture and the Parroquieta for Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculpture.
The halls with the gold and silver pieces also have other important works, such as the three reliquary caskets from Limoges, the altarpiece of Nuestra Señora de Salas from the fourteenth century, as well as a series of processional crosses, chalices, incense holders, hymnals, all typical of the Christian liturgy. The medieval art halls, in the Romanesque and Gothic cloisters, exhibit high Aragonese works of art from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, providing a pictorial record of the different trends in this area throughout the Middle Ages. Some of the highlights are the altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin of Pedro de Zuera and the altarpiece tables of Pallaruelo de Monegros signed by Martín Soria. Finally, the Parroquieta houses collections from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. One of the prime examples is the altarpiece from the Abbey of Montearagón of Gil de Morlanes; as well as paintings from Vincent Berdusán, the Bayeu, Luzán and Luis Muñoz.
Huesca Museum is located in the both the old Sertoriana university building and, attached to it, what remains of the Palace of the Kings of Aragon; both properties are themselves buildings of great historical and architectural interest.
The Palace of the Kings of Aragon is a magnificent example of late twelfth century civil Romanesque, and among its rooms are those with names like the “Bell Room”, the “Throne Room” and “Doña Petronila’s Room”. Sertoriana University, with its octagonal construction and splendid central courtyard dates from 1690, and is one of the greatest exponents of Baroque civil architecture.
After the renovations undertaken in the 1970s and between 1993 and 1995, the Museum has eight permanent exhibition rooms, laid out in a linear configuration, as well as three other rooms in the Palace of the Kings of Aragon for temporary exhibitions or other public activities. The collections cover two broad themes: the archaeological and artistic. The Archaeology section, with exhibits ranging from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, occupies the first four rooms; while the Fine Arts section occupies the four following rooms, and presents works ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, notably the set of Gothic paintings, the series of lithographs of the Bulls of Bordeaux by Goya and the work of Ramón Acín.
The Pedagogical Museum Aragon was established in 2006 to raise awareness of the history of education in Aragon, and the important role which the Community has played in the development of education systems and the teaching methods and resources used by teachers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the present day. To study school materials is to study the types of schools, teachers, developments in the concept of childhood, learning models and, above all, to be able to reflect on the knowledge that was considered useful at various times as well as the type of society at that time.
The Constitution of Cadiz proposed education as a right for every citizen in 1812; and, between then and 1978, when the regulation of the right to education was addressed by the Constitution, many different laws have been promulgated in Spain by different political regimes intent on appending their own ideas regarding education. The discourse has covered themes such as education as an institution, the education of girls, values and practices in schools, schools at the beginning of the twentieth century, the school in the Second Republic, the National Catholic school and technological media in the classroom.
Initial funding for the Museum came from collections deposited at the Centre for Teachers and Resources in Huesca, which has been collating and studying materials representative of different school models making up the educational heritage of Aragon since 1987.
On the initiative of Rafael Jiménez Martínez, the old school and schoolmaster's house in the village of Linas de Marcuello (in Loarre) was renovated in 2004, and materials belonging to the collection were displayed and helped to establish the Aragon Pedagogical Museum in May 2006.
Today, the old school of Linás de Marcuello can be considered as an extension of the Pedagogical Museum of Aragon. It offers the public an interesting museum to depict what life was like in a rural school, to show the conditions teachers worked under in these schools and the learning materials used by children from these small locations.
Parts of the old hydroelectric power plant, dismantled in the early 1970s, are now on display in the old flour mill in Murillo de Gállego.
The museum is divided over three floors: the ground floor has all the heaviest parts, like the generator, turbine and transformers; while the first floor holds a scale model of the original dam. The basement contains parts that are smaller, but of enormous importance in the control of the generating plant, such as voltmeters, ammeters, and even some of the first telephones installed in Spain, back in 1901.
The exhibition is completed by a collection of photographs of the old power plant, to help picture how the plant was constituted with each of these pieces on display.
