The Festival and its museum ship are docking in Barcelona for the first time
The Art Explora Festival, featuring the world’s first museum ship, will dock for the first time at the Port of Barcelona from March 26 to April 6.
Free and open to everyone, the festival transforms each port into a vibrant cultural hub that combines exhibitions, immersive experiences, and live performances, both aboard the museum ship and on land.
In Barcelona, the event takes place at the Barcelona North Pier, a new public space in the Old Port recently opened to the public. The Festival is the first major cultural event to be held in this space. With Art Explora, the Port of Barcelona reaffirms its commitment to opening the port to the public and promoting cultural initiatives that strengthen the bond between the city and the sea.
Traveling Cultural Project
Launched in 2024, the Art Explora Festival is a traveling cultural project that sails across seas and oceans aboard the world’s first museum ship, with the goal of expanding access to the arts. After eleven stops and welcoming more than 350,000 visitors, Barcelona has become a key port of call on this grand cultural odyssey.
In 2025, the festival will make stops in five Mediterranean countries—Albania (Durrës), France (Nice), Croatia (Rijeka), Greece (Piraeus/Athens), and Cyprus (Limassol)—where it will welcome diverse audiences to ambitious artistic projects developed by local curators and artists and designed to be accessible to everyone.
Open to the public
Designed by architects Axel de Beaufort and Guillaume Verdier, the 47-meter-long sailing catamaran can accommodate up to 2,000 visitors per day. On board, visitors can experience an immersive sound journey created by IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music at the Centre Pompidou in Paris), which offers a Mediterranean soundscape composed of natural, urban, and cultural environments recorded throughout the Mediterranean basin. In addition, a virtual reality experience developed with Ubisoft allows visitors to travel back in time to Alexandria, Athens, and Venice at the height of their artistic and architectural splendor.
Major exhibitions at the docks in Barcelona
At the port, three exhibition pavilions enhance the experience: *Presente*, created through an exceptional collaboration with the Louvre Museum, is a large-scale immersive exhibition dedicated to female figures from Mediterranean civilizations. The experience unfolds in a 16-meter-long tunnel lined with LED screens.
In the Central Pavilion, dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the exhibition Sota L’Atzur explores the Mediterranean as a space of myth, memory, and tension through works by major historical and contemporary artists.
The Photography Pavilion, dedicated to photography and the moving image, hosts Contracorriente, an exhibition by artists from the Arab world that addresses issues of migration, exile, and hospitality in the Mediterranean.
A live program especially for Barcelona
Curated by Spanish curator Rosa León, the program brings together live performances, talks, screenings, and concerts developed in dialogue with the Mediterranean context and the local art scene. Free and open to everyone, it offers daily encounters between artists, audiences, and ideas, transforming the port into a space for exchange, debate, and celebration. Highlights of the program include performances, concerts, and DJ sets by national and international artists.
With the celebration of the Art Explora Festival, the Port of Barcelona reaffirms its firm commitment to opening the port to the public and promoting cultural initiatives that strengthen the bond between the city and the sea.
