Free access with the Barcelona Card
Walk in free at CosmoCaixa and ride up on the same card, because the FGC line that gets you there is covered too. MNAC, MACBA, the Picasso Museum and the rest of the free list come with it. More about the Barcelona Card ->
Highlights
Tickets & Prices
One ticket covers the whole building. Entry is €8 and takes you into every permanent exhibition and whatever temporary show is running, booked into a time band starting at 10:00.
- Under-16s go in free, with an adult alongside them.
- CaixaBank customers go in free.
- Barcelona Card holders walk in free.
The desk sells on the day, so you can turn up. The museum runs its own ticket shop online and it works in Spanish and Catalan. On a wet Sunday morning the desk queue is the longest wait of the visit, and booking ahead is what skips it.
Card holders have one errand first. The voucher becomes a physical card at the tourist office under Plaça de Catalunya or at either airport terminal, and the clock only starts once you use it.
Cancelling or moving the date is free until 23:59 the day before. The full list of what the card opens sits on our discounts page.
The planetarium
The dome show is priced on its own, and you need a museum ticket as well.
Projections run full-dome to numbered seats. The commentary is in Catalan, with translation into Spanish, English and French and audio description throughout. The 3clipse programme runs in Catalan with Spanish and English.
Arrive ten minutes early. Once a session starts the doors stay shut.
Some visitors come out with a stiff neck. You watch the whole show with your head tipped back, and that suits some people more than others.
The workshops on the upper floors are also priced separately, and most of them run in Spanish.
Plan Your Visit
| Days | Opening hours |
|---|---|
| Monday–Sunday & public holidays | 10:00–20:00 |
| 24 & 31 December, 5 January | 10:00–18:00 |
- Closed 25 December, 1 January and 6 January.
- Free entry on 15 February for Santa Eulàlia, 18 May for International Museum Day, and 24 September for La Mercè.
- Last tickets go on sale half an hour before closing.
- Tuesday to Friday are the calm days.
- School groups fill the halls from late morning to early afternoon on weekdays, and a wet Sunday fills the place.
Saba CosmoCaixa sits on Carrer dels Quatre Camins 89 and opens from 7:00 to 23:00. Green and blue metered bays run through the surrounding streets.
Bikes and scooters park free beside the main entrance, twelve spaces for one and ten for the other. Coaches drop off on the Ronda de Dalt side road between Carrer de Balsareny and Carrer del Císter.
- Step-free routes throughout, adapted toilets on every floor, reserved parking bays
- Museum wheelchairs on loan from the information point by the main entrance, subject to availability
- Tactile guide paths running from the entrances to the planetarium hall
- Guided visits with audio description, and adapted visits with Catalan sign-language interpretation
- Adapted visits and easy-read guides for visitors with intellectual disabilities
- Pushchairs go through the exhibition halls
What to See & Do
Every permanent exhibition sits under that one ticket, along with whatever temporary show is up. Most of them are at the bottom.
You come in at the top and descend a thirty-metre spiral wound around an Amazonian tree, five floors down to where the collection starts.
The Flooded Forest
A thousand square metres of Amazon under glass, built in 2004 from a stretch of flooded forest near Santarém in Brazil. More than a hundred species live in it: leafcutter ants, tropical birds, fish, frogs, caiman, and the capybaras that children tend to shriek at.
You meet it from five heights, from underground and underwater at the glass, where the fish turn the room into an aquarium, up to the tree canopy.
Every fifteen minutes it rains.
The air in here is hot and wet, and it lands hard after the steady 21°C of the rest of the building. This is the room people travel across the city for, and they are right to.
Sala Universo
Three zones, colour-coded, carrying the museum’s whole argument.
Kósmos in red starts at the Big Bang. Evolución in green picks up where matter turns into life. Fronteras in blue finishes inside the human brain, under a dome built in the shape of one.
The specifics are what stay with you. A cloud chamber in Kósmos makes charged particles visible, cosmic rays and background radioactivity drawing lines through the air.
In Evolución, Jordi, Pau and Laia are hominid fossils between twelve and ten million years old, found not far from Barcelona. Two of them are holotypes, the original specimens their species were described from.
Beside them stands Carletto, a Neanderthal bust by Fabio Fogliazza, made with palaeoanthropologists. He is a man who painted and decorated his own face.
Fronteras holds a real human brain, preserved by plastination so you can read the blood vessels through it, and a terracotta cylinder almost four thousand years old carrying cuneiform script.
Lab Math runs alongside, a room of puzzles and mazes. Educators work the floor every day and answering your questions is their job, included with entry.
Sala Universo won the Kenneth Hudson Award at the 2021 European Museum of the Year Awards.
The Geological Wall and the fossils
beingbonny/DepositphotosSeven pieces of real rock, twenty-four metres end to end. Each slab comes with the experiment that explains it.
Potash salts from Súria and slates from León show folding. Sandstone from Puig-Reig shows how rock fractures. Glacial varves from Itú in Brazil are the thin layers a glacial lake laid down season by season, and there are fossil dunes from Palma and volcanic clay thrown out by the Croscat volcano above Olot.
Restos y Rastros picks up next door with fossils and the marks they left behind, a dinosaur footprint among them, and the trail of a horseshoe crab from nearly 150 million years ago. The piece to look for is a lump of Dominican amber called Jorge Caridad. Eight centimetres of it, holding nearly a hundred ants that died together twenty-five million years ago: thirty-five workers, twenty-six larvae, sixteen pupae and around twenty eggs.
Base Antàrtica
The original laboratory of the Juan Carlos I Antarctic base, rebuilt indoors around the work of Josefina Castellví, a pioneer of Spanish Antarctic exploration. National Geographic photographs hang around it, Frank Hurley’s 1915 picture of the Endurance held fast in the Weddell Sea among them.
Visiting with children
frantic00/DepositphotosEveryone under 16 goes in free with an adult.
The Bubble Planetarium is built for five to eight-year-olds, a small dome plus a Sun, Earth and Moon model on the floor, with an educator leading the session. It runs on the museum ticket.
Below five, the main hall asks more than most children will give it. Six is the age visitors keep naming as the point where it clicks. The pine grove outside has picnic tables, worth knowing before you commit a family to museum food.
The other two family days out on this site are Barcelona Zoo and the aquarium.
Insider Tips
- Go straight down the spiral. The collection is at the bottom, and the levels you pass hold activities you pay extra for.
- Book ahead, or arrive at 10:00. The ticket desk is the one queue you can avoid.
- Bring lunch. The cafeteria keeps microwaves, a can of soda in there runs €2.50, and by 13:30 the counter has been picked over.
- Give the outdoor gardens ten minutes on your way out. The Plaça de la Ciència is free to enter and looks out over the city, its hydroponic garden grows much of what the Flooded Forest’s animals eat, and the Archimedes’ Garden and the vertical garden sit right beside it.
- Carry a layer in summer. The halls are held at a steady 21°C all year round.
FAQs
Is CosmoCaixa free entry with the Barcelona Card?
Yes. CosmoCaixa is one of the museums the card covers in full.
Do I need to book CosmoCaixa tickets online?
No. The desk sells on the day. Book anyway if you are going on a weekend or in the rain.
Is the CosmoCaixa planetarium included in the ticket?
No, it is priced separately, and you need museum entry as well.
Are the CosmoCaixa tickets and exhibits in English?
Exhibit panels run in three languages including English. The museum’s own ticket shop works in Spanish and Catalan.
How long do you need at CosmoCaixa?
Two to three hours is the floor. Four covers a full visit with a workshop.
Where is the CosmoCaixa parking?
Saba CosmoCaixa, Carrer dels Quatre Camins 89, open 7:00–23:00.