The history of tourism in Sitges now has a museum

Teachers and students studying tourism management at the Institut Joan Ramon Benaprès in Sitges have worked for more than two years to create a very unique exhibition area: the Sitges Tourism Museum, now open to the public.

A set of display cases installed at the entrance to the school has a collection of very interesting material, the result of private donations and loans, which explain the ‘transformation of an agricultural and seafaring village’ into one of the best known holiday destinations in the 1920s and 1930s.

The director of the institute, Samuel Valls, and the tutor of the tourism management course, Iván Martínez, said that the main objective of the museum is to ‘value the people, companies and establishments that laid the foundations for the world of travel’.

Books from the 1920s and 30s, brochures, tickets, menus and countless articles and documents show that Sitges was a ‘pioneering destination’ and how tourism began to transform the local economy. The transformation cannot be understood without the figure of Santiago Rusiñol, who put the town on the map as a key point in the cultural innovation of the period. In the display, you can find a copy of Mis hierros viejos, a guide to the opening of the Cau Ferrat Museum in 1933, as well as a ticket from that first period, at a price of one peseta.

The Tourism Museum houses many other jewels, such as an advertising brochure of the Gran Hotel Subur, the top hotel of its time, highlighting the existence of electric light and toilets with running water, or a simple record with the sound of the sea of Sitges.