"The museum occupies a panoptic building restored in 1995, located in the heart of the city and which was previously used as a Palace of Justice and a prison. In 1990 it was declared a Site of Cultural Interest . Various activities and thematic exhibitions are held in this museum.
History
This 19th century building was born as a result of the need that the city of Vigo had for a public prison. Thus, on May 16, 1861, the Ministry approved the construction of the new prison. The project was carried out by the architect José María Ortiz y Sánchez . What at first was going to be a simple prison, ended up becoming a Palace of Justice with courts, prisons and a small hostel for the guards, whose construction was completed in 1880.
Exactly a century later, the City Council planned to demolish this building to build a tree-lined square in its place, but after the strong rejection of this new project by the architects Álvaro Siza Vieira and Javier Sáenz de Oiza and the professor of History of Art of the Higher School of Madrid, Pedro Navascués Palacio , it was achieved that on October 6, 1990 the General Directorate of Heritage of the Junta de Galicia declared the building as an Asset of Cultural Interest .
In 1995, the project for the rehabilitation of this building was awarded to the team of architects from Vigo , Salvador Fraga Rivas , Francisco Javier García-Quijada Romero and Manuel Portolés Sanjuán . The objective of this new project is to allocate the property to be the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO). After years of work and more than 2 million euros invested in the rehabilitation, the Museum was inaugurated in 2002."
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