The First Public Museum in Spain: It Is More than 200 Years Old (and It Is Not the Prado or the Guggenheim)

The Enlightenment brought with it the need to make knowledge a vital value. That is why it was then, in the eighteenth century, when the museum phenomenon began to thrive. Even if it did not do so in the definitive form, developed the following century, at this time the oldest in Spain was created. It is the National Museum of Natural Sciences, in Madrid, an institution that started being a royal cabinet and ended up surviving until the present …