Leather Museum and Anoia Regional Museum

These museums concerned with the leather industry are in two adjacent buildings close to the town centre of Igualada, north-west of Barcelona. One was the nineteenth-century Boyer cotton factory and the other was the eighteenth-century Granotes tannery. In the 1980s the town council bought the buildings and relocated two existing museums there – the local museum collections opened in 1949 and Museum of Leather created in 1954. The Can Boyer exhibitions show the long history of the tanning industry with leather objects, tools and equipment and explain the management and use of water for manufacturing and power. The tannery has been excavated and displayed to demonstrate authentically the process of making leather. This begins on the bank of the canal, where hides were soaked, treated with lime, cleaned of flesh and dressed. It continues upstairs, where the leather was dried, stretched, greased and polished. The displays have been developed continuously in collaboration with mNACTEC, the Museums of Science and Technology of Catalunya.