Museu d’Art de Girona

Housed in the historic Episcopal Palace, the Museu d’Art de Girona showcases an extensive collection spanning from the 9th to the 21st century, including Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern art. Highlights include the portable altar from Sant Pere de Rodes and the Virgin of Besalú. The museum also manages the former Santa Caterina Hospital, featuring a 17th-century pharmacy and chapel. Visitors can enjoy guided tours, temporary exhibitions, and educational activities.

Planning your visit

The Museu d'Art de Girona occupies the Episcopal Palace beside the cathedral, and its collection is unusually strong in medieval Catalan art — a period and region that produced work of real quality and remains under-known outside Spain. The holdings run from the ninth to the twenty-first century, with the Romanesque and Gothic sections the reason to visit: painted altar frontals, carved capitals, polychrome sculpture, and the portable altar from Sant Pere de Rodes, a rare survival in rock crystal and precious metal.

The Virgin of Besalú and the Gothic panel paintings show a Catalan tradition developing alongside, and sometimes ahead of, better-known Italian work. Later galleries cover Renaissance, Baroque and modern Catalan painting.

The museum also manages the former Santa Caterina hospital, whose seventeenth-century pharmacy survives complete with its jars and fittings.

Girona's old town is compact and steeply stacked, and the museum sits at the top beside the cathedral steps — familiar to many visitors from television filming.

Bookable options include skip-the-line tickets with audio guides and three-in-one passes covering the art museum, the cathedral and the Church of Sant Feliu, which is the efficient way to do the upper town. Current availability is shown below.