Museu de Ciències Naturals de València, Natural sciences museum in Jardins del Real, Valencia, Spain.
The Museu de Ciències Naturals de València is a natural sciences museum housed in a former restaurant building inside the Jardins del Real, a large park in the city of Valencia. Its collections cover paleontology, malacology, and local ecosystems, with fossils and specimens gathered from both Spain and South America.
The museum grew out of a donation made by Rodrigo Botet, who brought a large fossil collection from Argentina to Valencia in 1889. That original gift became the foundation of the institution and still makes up a central part of what visitors see today.
The building that houses the museum was originally a restaurant built in the 1920s in a rationalist style typical of Valencia at the time. Walking through it today, you can still notice the proportions and details of that era in the structure around the collections.
The museum sits inside the Jardins del Real, so you can combine a visit with a walk through the surrounding park at no extra effort. The building is easy to find once you are inside the park, and the layout inside is straightforward to follow room by room.
The museum holds one of the most complete Megatherium skeletons in Europe, a giant ground sloth from South America that lived millions of years ago. This is the same fossil brought over by Rodrigo Botet himself, making it one of the oldest pieces in the collection.
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