World's Biggest Cannabis Museum Opens in Barcelona

By Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Source: artnet.com


The Hash Marihuana Cáñamo & Hemp Museum of Barcelona, at the Palau Mornau
Photo via: Designboom

Unlike in the Netherlands, cannabis consumption hasn't been legalized in Spain, but from Friday onwards Barcelona will boast the biggest museum in the world devoted to marijuana's various uses and properties, El Periodico reports.

The museum is the brain-child of Dutch entrepreneur Ben Dronkers, founder of Amsterdam's Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum and the company HempFlax, dedicated to growing and processing industrial hemp.

Dronker's Barcelona outpost project began in 2002, when he found and purchased an impressive palace in Barcelona's Gothic quarter which had fallen into severe disrepair. The Palau Mornau was originally erected in the 15th century, but during the early 20th century was refurbished in the dazzling Modernisme style.

Dronkers spent the next ten years renovating the historical building and working towards realizing his dream of having the Barcelona-based Hash Marihuana Cáñamo & Hemp Museum. The institution will house more than 65,000 objects, including ethnographic artifacts, and pot-related visual material, sprawled across 900 sumptuous square meters.

The message that Dronkers wants to convey with his museum doesn't just cover the recreational and medicinal properties of the plant. Dronkers also wants to make people aware of the sustainable properties of hemp for all sorts of industrial uses, from textiles to furniture.

The museum has, of course, a shop, where one can buy a wide array of cannabis-related merchandise, from Bob Marley posters to pipes (just not the stuff to be smoked in them).