Maritime Museum and the Royal Shipyards (Drassanes)

Museum · Raval waterfront, foot of La Rambla (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

The Crown of Aragon's covered shipyard in Barcelona, long stone naves where war galleys were built and slid straight into a sea now streets away.

The Drassanes Reials were a factory for warships, and the factory is what survives. From the late thirteenth century the Crown of Aragon built and repaired its galleys here under a stone roof, in long parallel naves whose pointed arches stand high enough to work under a mast. The sea came up to the doors, so a finished hull was slid straight out of the building onto the water. Everything between those doors and today's quayside is made ground. Most of what you walk through was rebuilt in the early sixteenth century on the medieval footings, after storms wrecked the earliest bays. Ship work stopped in the eighteenth century and the building spent two hundred years as an army arsenal, barracks, prison and cannon foundry. The soldiers left in 1935 and the museum opened the following year. Its centrepiece is the Reial, the flagship John of Austria commanded at Lepanto in 1571: sixty metres of gilded hull, fifty-nine oars, two hundred and thirty-six men on the benches. What fills the nave is a full-size reconstruction.

Worth knowing

Good to know

This is the wet-day and heatwave sight — the naves are stone, shaded and cool, mostly step-free, and large enough to absorb a crowd without ever feeling like a queue.
Look up before you look at anything else — stand at one end of a nave with the exhibits behind you and let the row of arches run away from you down the hall.
The sailing ship is not in the building — the museum's schooner Santa Eulalia lies on the harbour front a few minutes away, and it is sometimes gone for repairs.
The quietest large sight in the old town — most people walking down La Rambla stop at the bottom, turn around and never notice the doors on the far side of the road.

Things to do

1
Follow the galley from bow to stern
Take the raised walkway alongside the Reial and go from bow to stern at the level of the benches. Count the oar ports as you pass and picture four men to each one. From the floor the ship reads as decoration; from up here it reads as a machine that needed two hundred and thirty-six people to move.
2
Pace out the shoreline that moved
Go out of the seaward doors and stand with your back to the building. The beach once ran up to the stone behind you. Walk toward the harbour and keep counting your steps: every metre of that ground was made after the shipyard stopped launching, and the modern quay is a long way out.
3
Take a bay with nobody in it
Pick a bay away from the main route, stand under the middle of its arch and look straight up. The stone is unornamented and the ribs are plain. This is the working end of Gothic building, and the hall is quiet enough at that point to hear the roof timbers move.