Museu del Cinema-Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol

Located in Girona’s Mercadal district, the Museu del Cinema-Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol exhibits a vast collection of pre-cinema and cinema artifacts, offering an interactive journey through the history of moving images.

Planning your visit

The Tomàs Mallol collection is about everything that came before film. Shadow puppets, magic lanterns, camera obscuras, peepshow boxes, zoetropes, praxinoscopes, phenakistiscopes — the optical devices through which people produced and consumed moving images for centuries before the Lumière brothers, and which the museum argues are the real prehistory of cinema rather than a curiosity preceding it.

Around 25,000 objects assembled by one collector fill the route, with many devices working and operable by visitors, which is essential: these things only make sense in motion.

The cinema section proper covers early film equipment, posters and the industry's development.

Girona is a Catalan city of medieval walls, a Jewish quarter and coloured houses along the Onyar, an hour from Barcelona by train. The museum sits centrally. Allow ninety minutes. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is shown below.