El Paleontològic

The story of El Paleontològic begins not with a building, but with a man in search of bones. Meet José Rodrigo Botet—a name that surfaces early in Valencia’s paleontological tale. He’s the engineer who, in a pivotal moment of civic ambition, donated a private fossil collection to the city.

His lifework travels with the collection from Argentina to Valencia, arriving first by ship to Barcelona on July 14, 1889, then by a special train that ferried the treasure to the city by August 9. This is the seed of what becomes the Municipal Museum of Paleontology, a collection built around the South American Quaternary, and it centers on a star specimen: a human skeleton known as Samborombón. The collection’s journey isn’t smooth—cholera outbreaks, political shifts, and the cost of preservation all press in as the years unfold.

In those first chapters, the collection doesn’t stay in one place for long. By 1896, it’s housed away from the historic center, in a former Jesuit structure—the San Pablo’s Hospital—near the Alquería de Julià, a relocation born of necessity and space. The collection’s future, though, begins to tilt toward a grander ambition: to bring science into public view, to turn paleontology into a civic stage.