Second floor, Museum of the Shots of Granada

The rooms are dedicated to the development of a graphic museum of the history of Granada, very much in line with the local museums which were being set up around this time in Spain. The promoter or architect of this first museological and museographical project was Antonio Gallego Burín, who managed to gather together a significant collection of objects with a Granada theme. These objects were organised by environmentally recreating history in a chronological sequence which was begun in the 16th century and ended in the 20th century.

After a profound restoration of the building, which was completed in the last decade of the 20th century, a plan was made to re-direct its image towards a museum with a more specific content, and thus a new type of exhibition space focused around Granada in the 19th century was created. Throughout all of the exhibition spaces in the historical building, the museum which is presented in the visit displays a solid vision of those events and concepts which marked the 19th century.

In the second floor of the House, one of The most spectacular rooms of this house: The Golden block. This coffered ceiling on the ceiling of the main hall is composed of reliefs of Relevant figures of the Conquest of Granada and a small writing in old Castilian of the exploits of each one, forming a structure similarly to a chess board. Among them are the Catholic Monarchs and various Christian warriors.

Exhibition Halls

Room I. The landscape:
Sample of different graphic and literary representations of the city of Granada.

Room 1 begins the tour with an approach to the image of the city, transmitted over time by a multitude of artists who have contributed to fix it, not only locally but worldwide.

In the following two rooms, a basic element is explained in the understanding of this historical moment of the city, Orientalism, which had an internationally famous point of attention in Granada, the Alhambra.

Room II Orientalism (1):
Favorite theme of Romanticism.

Room III Orientalism (2):
Representation of the concept of the oriental, which would reach its peak in the nineteenth century. Travel books that spread the taste for the exotic and the Middle Ages, making the city of Granada the goal and search for those values, being a city where the eastern and the western converge, being a reference for poets, painters, musicians and writers of the stature of José Zorrilla 5 who turned his poem Granada into one of the most important orientalist poems concerning Romanticism. 6Another factor shown is the birth of Orientalist studies, with figures such as Francisco Javier Simonet, Leopoldo Eguilaz, Gaspar Remiro, Miguel Lafuente Alcántara, Antonio Almagro Cárdenas and the creation of the Historical and Philological Society of Friends of the East and the recovery of La Alhambra, incorporating the first conservation theories.

Room IV Travelers:
Thanks to its rich cultural past and its geographical proximity, due to its aspect of another time and its Islamic past, the city of Granada becomes a place to visit at the end of the 19th century, as the Alhambra and the rest of the city, which still retained its old town planning, became one of the great myths of Romanticism. Some of these travelers were writers or painters, disseminators of Granada throughout Europe through their stories, their engravings or lithographs. The environment that these travelers could find when they arrived in the city is recreated.

Complement of the above is room 4, dedicated to remind travelers who arrived in Granada throughout the 19th century. Foreign travelers, such as Washington Irving, of which a portrait is exhibited, such as Spaniards.

Room V-VI. Industrial arts:
Fajalauza pottery samples, produced in the Albaycín neighborhood, 7 and small sculptures, popularly called “muds” for travelers and the Granada bourgeoisie.

Rooms 5 and 6 focus on Granada’s industrial arts: mud, metal work, alpujarreños fabrics, brass lanterns and, above all of them, Fajalauza ceramics.

Room VII. The costumbrismo:
The costumbrismo of century XIX centered in popular types like bandits, sellers, and, mainly, gypsies of the Sacromonte, since it was a district that was especially attractive to the travelers and writers of the time. Granada was a peripheral area and very little modernized and because it became an inescapable destination, its people also became famous in books, paintings, photographs and prints, although the transmitted image was not a vision of reality, but a vision much more romantic.

Costumbrismo also occupies a prominent place in the Spanish culture of the 19th century, which is reflected in room 7, where the racial myths of the Spanish people are protagonists, with special reference to Granada: the Granada-born bullfighter Frascuelo (c. 1885), the Hazelnuts of the Hazel, the gypsies of the Sacromonte caves, etc.

Museum of the Shots of Granada
Casa de los Tiros is a museum and property located in the Spanish city of Granada, autonomous community of Andalusia. It is located in the Realejo neighborhood, on Pavaneras street. Its name is due to the artillery pieces in its battlements. It is currently the headquarters of the Casa de los Tiros Museum in Granada; for some years, it also hosted the Athenaeum of Granada.

The museum was growing with works such as drawings, prints, lithographs, photographs, plans, pieces of local handicrafts such as mud, lanterns, textiles, bibliographic backgrounds of Granada, travel, serials, brochures, posters or newspapers, donated by individuals who make up the funds of this museum.

The selection criteria for the objects displayed a profound sense of the future, because efforts were focused on recovering drawings, engravings, lithographs, photographs, drawings, pieces of local craftsmanship such as earthenware, streetlamps, fabrics, etc. Bibliographical objects with a Granada theme, travel documents, series of publications, pamphlets etc. were also collected. This significant effort to organise the Museum was completed with the collection, through purchase or donation, of private archives from individuals who were of note in the cultural life of Granada. Gallego Burín would also donate his personal archives to this museum.

In the layout of the Casa de los Tiros Museum, there are several halls of special interest, such as the one dedicated to the Romantic travellers, centred on the figure of Washington Irving; the hall on industrial art, which accommodates the value and importance of the local craftsmanship; or the hall dedicated to the gypsy world, the only one dedicated to such an important human group at the time.

The historical importance of the building must also be mentioned, in particular, the tower or main body with which the house, as an example of architecture from the 16th century, is presented to the city. Based on an Islamic past, the tower was transformed by its owner, Gil Vázquez Rengifo, in the 16th century, developing an interesting symbolic programme linked to and based on the exaltation of the medieval hero and the passage into modernity in this process.

Collection
The museum offers visitors three tours of its facilities. First, the main itinerary, room to room, starting from the central courtyard and ascending the stairs to the different floors. Second, the visitor can opt for a thematic or purely chronological view, thanks to the flexibility of his museological approach. Finally, a third option is proposed consisting of visiting the building itself for its architectural value, focusing on the uniqueness of the tower, patio and garden that the house has, drawing attention to its spatial conception as a typical Granada home.

Given the nature of the museum’s funds and the era to which they mostly belong, the nineteenth century has chosen to focus the discourse of the permanent exhibition in this historical period, with the intention of extending this chronological limit in the future and being aware that it is always possible to use the temporary exhibition hall as a complement to expand in detail the multiple aspects of museum discourse.

Knowing the richness of the exhibited collection it is easy to propose or undertake other routes or visits from other perspectives, such as a purely chronological vision or the possibility of following the history and evolution of various artistic techniques such as print or photography.

Finally, it is highly recommended a visit in which the protagonist is the building starting with the spaces of the museum that remember his past as a palace of Gil Vázquez Rengifo and later of the Granada Venegas or Marquises of Campotéjar, of which the hallway is preserved with animal paintings on the ceiling; following the main staircase, where a collection of portraits of Spanish kings of the House of Austria from the Generalife is exhibited; the small staircase of the 16th century with wall paintings of the Virtues; and, finally, the Golden Square, the main hall of the building, which retains remnants of mural painting and a rich wooden wall decorated with reliefs of the most important characters in the history of Spain until the reign of Emperor Carlos V.