Dossier of Services
Arts and crafts community
In 1997, El Poble Espanyol at Montjuïc, under its new management team, began a journey: to look at the open-air museum's origins and recover the craft tradition and concern for creativity which inspired its creation.
The few craft workshops still open at the time were the nucleus around which a new concept began to expand: the arts and crafts community. Under this name and idea, one workshop after another has been set up in the open-air museum, until it has reached around forty, which is the situation today.
This situation has made it possible for the Village to recover one of its main attractions; that is, to offer the opportunity to get to know various crafts at close quarters and to experience them "live". It is a genuine experience of "handmade culture".
In the almost forty craft workshops working in the open-air museum, you can discover production techniques and qualities – both of materials used and finishes – and appreciate how innovative elements of design and shape can enrich a traditional product. People who come to the Village find the aspect of the crafts that most interests them: from visitors who discover techniques they did not know, to schoolchildren learning the value of handmade objects.
The techniques that can currently be found here are: ceramics, engraving, decorative painting, glass fusing, puppet-making, jewellery, masks, sculpture, leather, embroidery, basket-weaving, musical instrument-making, espadrille-making and a long list of others. Because of this concentration, and the rigour of the work done in the workshops, El Poble Espanyol has been declared an Area of Craft Interest by the Catalan Government.
The Village has recently become part, as an Art and Craft Shopping Centre, of the shopping circuit designed by Turisme de Barcelona and known as the Barcelona Shopping Line.