Valencian Museum of Ethnology

The Valencian Museum of Ethnology is a museum located in the city of Valencia, mediterranean Spain. The museum mission defines it as cultural institution primarily devoted to collect, research and communicate the tangible and intangible heritage related to traditional and popular Valencian culture. The mission underlines that the museum also aims to permanently question fundamental aspects of the culture, as the dynamics that built it and force it to evolve, as well as its diversity. Although fundamentally devoted to Valencian cultural identity within a Mediterranean context, this museum also works to give visitors the chance to understand the challenges and dynamics of culture as a whole and from a contemporary perspective.

The end of Franco's dictatorship and the political transition of the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed the re-emergency of culturally distinct identities within the Spanish state. As part of this wave, and somehow revitalizing some other historical attempts, the Valencian Museum of Ethnology was originally impulsed by Joan Francesc Mira, an intellectual and anthropologist deeply interested in the valencian cultural identity. The institution was finally created in 1982 by the regional government called Diputació de València and placed in its current location at the Beneficència Cultural Centre, in the city center of València.

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