Madrid | A museum for blind people to discover monuments

(Madrid) With their fingertips, José Pedro and Marina search for the entrance to the Sagrada Familia, explore its façade, then go back up a tower: in Madrid, a museum exhibits models of monuments from all over the world to allow blind people to discover them through touch.

“There are so many little details, so many! Look at the roof, how strange it is!” enthuses José Pedro Gonzalez in front of the wooden reproduction of the famous Barcelona basilica designed by Gaudi, about 137 times smaller than the original, and measuring about 1 meter.

“I didn’t imagine the Sagrada Familia like that… It’s very surprising, because you get a general idea of ​​what the monument is like, what the space is like,” explains Marina Rojas.

Created in 1992 by Once, the powerful national organization of the blind in Spain with 71,000 members, the Typhlological Museum of Madrid (from the Greek tuphlós: blind) houses 37 reproductions of monuments, most of which are listed as World Heritage Sites.

Made of wood, metal, resin and stone, the models allow visitors, whether they have vision problems or not, to touch the buildings, a sensory experience designed for the blind.

“There is no other place in the world that has a museum like this,” says Mireia Rodriguez, the museum guide, who is herself visually impaired. “There are many other museums designed for people with visual disabilities, but they don’t have this kind of collection.”

The Once lottery and scratch cards, which are so popular with the Spanish, bring in 2.5 billion euros (about 3.8 billion Canadian dollars) a year, which helps finance the salaries of some 72,000 employees, 61% of whom are disabled.

These revenues also allow for other investments, including this Madrid museum, which welcomed 16,000 visitors in 2023, and also presents works of art created by artists with visual disabilities, as well as an area exhibiting the material used from the beginning of the 19th century to the 1980s to offer blind people access to culture, such as books in Braille.

It’s “wonderful”, sums up Marina Rojas: “We can explain to you whatever we want, you can’t really get a global picture, and of course that generates a lot of frustration…”, whereas here “you can touch a little bit of lots of places in the world”, she says, dreamily.

“Getting closer to culture”

The 32-year-old’s eyes see only a little light, but perceive nothing else.

“Touch gives you a lot of information, although most of it comes through sight, it’s important to touch. Being able to enjoy a monument like this is an opportunity to get closer to culture, to art,” she says, surrounded by reproductions of Santiago de Compostela, Burgos Cathedral, the Royal Palace of Madrid, and the Alhambra in Granada.

In another room, foreign monuments are exhibited, from London’s Tower Bridge to the Statue of Liberty, the Kremlin and the Parthenon. It is on the dome of the Taj Mahal that José Pedro Gonzalez’s hands linger the most, a dome made of Makrana marble, the same dazzling white marble as that of the Indian building in Agra.

“I knew it was a marble building, but I didn’t expect this, to be able to touch it, to feel that it is cold,” he smiles, as his palm runs over the roofs and facades of the mausoleum.

“I love all the marble carving work, the little details, even though it’s a building, it’s not a work of goldsmithing, and yet it looks like one,” describes the sixty-year-old, who has been blind since birth.