PIA ALMOINA - ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM

La Pia Almoina is a Gothic palace that originally housed a lay charitable institute whose main activity was the distribution of bread and clothing to the poor families of the town. At the beginning of the 14th century, the headquarters of the University moved to the premises of the Pia Almoina, where it remained until 1928, when it was moved to its current location, Passeig de la Indústria. Today it houses the Archaeological Museum of Banyoles.

Pia Almoina. Built from a group of medieval houses in pre-Romanesque and Romanesque style. There are some very interesting architectural elements of Catalan civil Gothic: one enters by passing under a semicircular arch with large moats, to go towards the rear courtyard of the building, which is adjoined by a façade reinforced with buttresses and equipped with two windows similar to the semicircular arches of the entrance. Inside, there is the vestibule where a collection of medieval objects from the Sant Esteve monastery is on display, followed by a quadrangular central courtyard with a remarkable Gothic gallery formed by pointed arches carved in Girona nummulitic stone.

Archaeological museum. It has a very rich collection of paleontological and archaeological objects found in various places in the district: from late Tertiary and early Quaternary deposits to the Roman ovens of Ermedàs (now Cornellá del Terri), the palaeontological caves of Serinyà, the area of the Neolithic lake village of La Draga (Banyoles), and the Chalcolithic Bronze Age sepulchral caves of Martis (now Esponellà), a journey of several thousand years is made. The most famous piece in the museum is certainly the "mandible of Banyoles", discovered by the pharmacist Pere Alsius i Torrent in 1887. This piece of jawbone is one of the oldest human remains in Catalonia: the latest studies suggest that it belonged to a woman of around 40 years of age, whose teeth were damaged by chewing leather and who may have been in contact with Neanderthal men at the beginning of the last Wurm glaciation. It is estimated that she lived between 80,000 and 45,000 years BC. The museum has the advantage of offering a comprehensive view of the history of Banyoles and its surroundings, covering a vast period from the first human occupations to the 19th century. Instructive.