03 October 2016

El museo de los Caños de Peral

One of the things that I love about Madrid is all of the free cultural activities and museums that the city has.

Recently, I visited a historical museum that is inside the Ópera metro station (the metro closest to my house). It's free, but it's only open 3 days a week for four hours a day, so you have to get there rather quickly if you want to actually walk through and read the descriptions. Otherwise, the exhibition is behind glass, so it's pretty well-visible if you're just walking through.

The museum is called "El museo de los Caños de Peral", and it contains archeological remnants of the aqueducts, arroyos, and fountains that supplied water to the Renaissance town of Madrid. Apparently the fountain functioned until the early 1800s, when the creation of the Plaza of Isabel II buried it 10 meters underground.




The fountain, aqueduct and alcantarilla (culvert, gutter, drain, pipe) were discovered in 2009 and converted into a museum when the Ópera metro station was being remodeled. The museum designers have added mannequins dressed in period costumes, as you can see in the photo above. The costumes are all the wardrobes from prior opera shows, since it's the metro station closest to Madrid's Royal Opera House.

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