Museo de Arte y Artesanía de Linares, Art and crafts museum in Linares, Chile

The Museo de Arte y Artesanía de Linares occupies a colonial-style building dating from 1886 and displays multiple collections across its exhibition halls. The collections include paintings, sculptures, folk crafts, historical objects, and archaeological pieces from the region.

The museum was founded in 1962 with donations from Chilean artists, and its collection was declared a Historic Monument in 1987. The building itself, a colonial-style house on Valentín Letelier street built in 1886, was declared a National Monument in 1996 by Decree No. 389. A restoration between 2009 and 2010 allowed the museum to reopen with expanded capacity.

The museum's popular art and craft collection holds over 1,600 folkloric and ethnographic objects of traditional Chilean culture: ceramics, basketry, textiles, carvings and ironwork. It also runs temporary visual-arts and popular-craft exhibitions, poetry recitals, lectures, folklore, literature and art workshops, and documentary and film cycles.

The building is centrally located in Linares and easily accessible by public transport. Plan to spend enough time to view the exhibition halls and collections at a comfortable pace.

The archaeology collection holds petroglyphs from Guaiquivilo and stone tools left by the area's original peoples. The history and anthropology collection keeps more than 200 objects, books, documents, photographs and clothing that belonged to leading figures of Chilean national history.