The Girona City Council has restarted architectural excavations at the Casa Pastors, headquarters of the former Provincial Court, which will in the future house the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
This new phase is a continuation of the work carried out between the months of May and August of this year and aims to "define more accurately the historical and scientific interest of the site", where vestiges of "possible relevance" were found.
Depending on what is found in this second phase of excavations in the subsoil, the City Council will decide what decisions it makes in relation to the future Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani, a facility that has been in existence for several terms and that must house, among others, the future art collection and the library of the art critic Rafael Santos Torroella.
The work will last six weeks and has a cost of 32,211 euros, which is financed by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat and the Girona City Council. In the first phase of excavations, the work focused on the interior environment of the wall, located in the western and northern sectors of the Casa Pastors.
The result was the discovery of several medieval and Roman structures. The subsoil was also analyzed with a georadar, the results of which are pending study.
Last February, before the first phase of excavations, the Girona councilor for culture, Quim Ayats, assured that these previous works were not going to affect the opening dates of the museum, which was scheduled for 2026. In total , the conversion of the building into a museum has a cost of 9.8 million euros.
Now, with this second phase, it seems unlikely that the set schedule will be maintained. One work, the rehabilitation of the old Provincial Court building, which has suffered several interruptions. The work began in 2019 but had to stop shortly after to demolish some walls in the west patio for security reasons.
Casa Pastors is located in front of the Cathedral and very close to the old route of the Via Augusta, inside the historic complex of Girona. In this environment, there was the nerve center of Gerunda, the most important space in the political, cultural, religious and civic sphere of the ancient city.
In the Casa Pastors there are remains of the Roman and medieval walls, of a medieval castle and of a baroque palace despite the intervention that involved the rehabilitation of the building in the 1970s to convert it into the headquarters of the Provincial Court. A function that the building performed until 2008.
