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MARQ (Museo Arqueologico Provincial de Alicante)

The MARQ, the Archeological Museum of the Province of Alicante, opened to the public on May 28, 2002 with a ceremony presided over by Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain. The museum is housed in a renovated building in which the archaeological institute can carry out all facets of its mission including conservation, research and dissemination. The MARQ offers a unique and innovative exhibit covering all periods from pre-history until the first third of the twentieth century.
In 1995, a project for a new museum was developed which proposed a significant expansion of the Archaeological Museum. Local governmental authorities (the Provincial Government of Alicante) and the Regional government (Generalitat Valenciana) accepted the proposal for the new museum and supported the adaptation of a series of building which had been constructed in the 1920s as the San Juan de Dios Hospital.
The MARQ exhibit was planned to be installed in two phases. In June 2000, the first phase, consisting of four exhibit areas dedicated to the Prehistory, the Iberian Period, Roman Culture and the Middle Age, was completed. The second phase includes a fifth area dedicated to the Modern and Contemporary Periods and an innovative 1,000 square meter exhibit on archaeological methods. An outline of the major goals of the museum was developed and put to bid internationally. Several projects were entered and the award was made to General de Producciones y Diseño. An extensive team of professionals from this enterprise, under the direction of Boris Micka, worked closely with the MARQ technicians to bring the project to fruition.
The different themes on display offer visitors the chance to take an exciting trip back though history.
Visitors coming into the Museum are immediately submerged into the geographical region of Alicante. They are shown the rich and varied monumental landscape that this area has to offer. Form there, the historical tour of the permanent exhibition rooms takes them through Prehistory, the Iberian and Roman cultures, the Middle Ages and the Modern and Contemporary Eras.
In MARQ, the different exhibition areas are joined by introductory thematic blocks that give chronological continuity to the content, supplemented by interactive areas including detailed information about archaeological sites, descriptions of archaeological exhibits, the ways of life of the different cultures and so on.
The Museum also shows the visitor the Archaeology world. Scenes with audio-visual and interactive displays are reconstructed in three rooms; Field Archaeology, Urban Archaeology, Urban Archaeology and Underwater Archaeology, which help us to see the techniques used by archaeologists to uncover the past while at the same time giving us valuable information in an attractive, educational way.
Additionally, the Museum has exhibition space for temporary exhibits and the necessary facilities to carry out investigation, conservation and restoration work along with cataloguing and information-diffusion. The MARQ is administered jointly by two institutions within the framework of an administrative agreement: the Provincial Government of Alicante and the MARQ Foundation. The directors and technical staff of the museum report to the Provincial Government. The Foundation finances a variety of activities and events including temporary exhibits, conferences and publications. The main goal of the MARQ is to continue to coordinate and promote its projects throughout the province of Alicante. Furthermore, the MARQ has created a network of archaeological sites and site-based museums which includes and highlight the Roman city Lucentum (Alicante), the Illeta dels Banyets (El Campello) with ruins from the Bronze Age and the Iberian and Roman eras, and El Pla de Petracos (Castell de Castells) where cave drawings from the Neolithic age have been found. All of these excavation sites come under the Museum’s purview. MARQ is a museum of archaeology that hopes to revive the traditional museum, but also a project conceived and developed to meet the challenge of being first archaeological museum of he 21st century.
Contact:  Rafael Azuar
Web site: http://www.marqalicante.com/
Phone:  965 149 000