Puig de sa Morisca Archaeological Park Foundation.

 

Calvià, 28th March 2023

THE PUIG DE SA MORISCA ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK FOUNDATION IN CALVIÀ, WHICH WILL MANAGE THE MUSEUM, IS NOW ESTABLISHED

Calvià Town Hall, the Regional Government, the Mallorca Council and the University of the Balearic Islands are part of the Foundation's board of trustees

The mayor of Calvià, Alfonso Rodríguez Badal, the vice president of the Consell de Mallorca, Bel Busquets; the general director of Culture of the Govern, Catalina Solivellas, and the rector of the Universitat de les Illes Balears, Jaume Carot, have established this morning the Puig de sa Morisca Archaeological Park Foundation, which will manage the Museum that will shortly come into operation.

The Foundation is made up of the Calvià Town Hall, the Government of the Balearic Islands, the Consell de Mallorca and the Universitat de les Illes Balears, and its purpose is the conservation, research, restoration, exhibition, valuation, dissemination, acquisition and socialisation of the historical, cultural and natural heritage of the Puig de sa Morisca Archaeological Park in Calvià.

The board of trustees will be financially integrated 50% by the Calvià Town Hall, and 25% by the Govern and the Mallorca Council, respectively. The UIB will offer support for scientific research and didactic and pedagogical activities, as well as advice and technical support.

The Park is being visited, under normal circumstances, by around 70.000 people a year, with the autumn and spring seasons being the ones with the greatest influx.

The Museum has been financed with funds from the Sustainable Tourism Tax, while the Mallorca Council, through the Tourist Accommodation Consortium, and the Calvià Town Hall, finance the conditioning and landscaping of the Archaeological Park.

The event was also attended by the councillor for Heritage, Francisca Muñoz; the councillor of Santa Ponça, Nati Francés, and the councillors Rafel Sedano and Marga Plomer, as well as the technical manager of Heritage of the Town Hall, doctor Manel Calvo.

The museum

The Museum that has been built has an area of about 1.500 m2 and is organised on two floors. On the first floor there is a large lobby that allowa access to the different rooms: the temporary exhibition hall, the restoration and archeology laboratories, the Museum's administrative services, the shop and the bar. The permanent exhibition room and the different warehouses that will display and house the archaeological collections of the municipality of Calvià are located on the underground floor.

The Museum's permanent exhibition will propose a universal theme. Under the title Humans in contact, throughout the entire exhibition it will be shown how contact with other people and communities has made us, over time, essentially human.

However, these contacts have been very diverse and have had very different consequences. For this reason, throughout the permanent exhibition it will be possible to see the different types of contact that existed throughout time and in which the Puig de sa Morisca Archaeological Park offers us a unique window to get closer to them. The contact between the Punics and the Talayotics, the relations between the Roman conquerors and the local communities, or what the conquest of Majorca by the troops of King Jaume I meant in 1229 will be shown. The exhibition will end with the complexities and contradictions of current contacts where the transmission of information and the movement of people take us from our daily reality to a global universe.

Puig de sa Morisca Archaeological Park

Parallel to the construction of the Museum, new projects are being developed in the Park.

On the one hand, the adaptation of the 35 hectares that make up the park will be carried out for public visits. New itineraries will be designed. Thus, there will be more than 6 km of paths and that will be able to be traveled and that will allow us to observe the great botanical and natural wealth of the place. The six existing sites as well as the nine existing ethnographic groups will be adapted, and the five viewpoints of the park will be improved.

On the other hand, in collaboration with the Universitat de les Illes Balears, work is being done on the creation of a garden area where you can walk and see the plants that existed before the arrival of humans in Mallorca, the impact and changes brought about by the arrival of human communities, as well as the main plants that were cultivated or used during prehistory. This involves the design of an entire space that will be located just after the Museum and will make up another visit spaces of the Puig de sa Morisca Archaeological Park.

The action will conclude with the remodeling of the entrance to the Park, the adaptation of the existing trails or itineraries with the creation of an accessible exterior route in which the signage can be concentrated with the pedagogical or explanatory contents of the archaeological zone, and other actions such as the information digitisation for capacity control, etc.