Palau Martorell Tickets

Benefits

• One ticket covers the palace and whichever exhibition fills its three floors
• The building is an attraction in its own right, from the marble staircase to the stained-glass skylight
• Book online and show the voucher on your phone at the door

Tickets & Prices

One entry ticket covers everything under the roof, the exhibition and the palace together. The audio guide isn’t included, it’s paid separately onsite. Reduced entry applies for over-65s, students, unemployed visitors and large families, children aged 6 to 12 pay a lower rate, and under-6s go in free.

Online entry tickets are nonrefundable and can’t be moved to another date, so pick a day you’re sure of.

If the palace is one stop on a bigger art day, combo tickets pair it with the Moco Museum, Casa Milà or Sagrada Família at a discount on both.

Plan Your Visit

What to See & Do

ICONS: Steve McCurry(until 6 September 2026)

Around 150 photographs from more than forty years of McCurry’s career, hung by theme rather than by date. Portraits hold the ground floor. Upstairs is the childhood series, and the basement gathers his award-winning work, the 9/11 photographs among them. The famous one is here too: the Afghan Girl, Sharbat Gula, photographed in Peshawar in 1984, her name unknown to the world for another 27 years.

The prints hang large on deep green and near-black walls, and the colour work lands hard against them. The gaze in those portraits carries the show – subject after subject looking straight back at you. Two short films of McCurry explaining how he works give the portraits their backstory.

The palace itself

Joan Martorell i Montells raised the building between 1886 and 1900 as the head office of the Crédito Mercantil bank, and in 1901 it took first prize in the city council’s annual competition for artistic buildings. The facade plays it straight, five symmetrical openings with Doric columns below and Ionic above. Inside is where it opens up: the marble staircase with its iron railing, the central courtyard, and that blue cartwheel of a stained-glass skylight.

Ask the room staff about the building – they know its history well and enjoy telling it. Before McCurry the palace hosted Sorolla, Botero, Chagall, Mucha and a show of 19th-century Japan, and it has become the kind of venue you check whenever you’re back in town.

Insider Tips

• Book an afternoon slot rather than the 19:00 last entry. Rooms start shutting around 19:50 and the final hour feels rushed.
• The palace is kept noticeably cool with the lighting low. In summer that makes it a genuine midday refuge, and a light layer is worth carrying in any season.
• Even in July the rooms stay quiet – at one summer show a father and son had the place nearly to themselves.
• The spot lighting can throw reflections off the glazed prints. A slight change of angle deals with it.
• The gripe that recurs in lower-star reviews is price: entry can feel steep if the building itself isn’t part of the draw for you. The combo tickets are the answer if it is a borderline call.
• Finish at La Plata around the corner, a tiny old-school tapas bar, for a vermouth.

FAQs