2 September 1947: Archaeology Museum established in Malaga

The museum was eventually inaugurated in 1949, having been housed in the Alcazaba fortress. The permanent exhibitions were installed in the palatial rooms, while the defensive towers were used as warehouses and restoration workshops.

The museum was not short of artifacts and was soon displaying items discovered during different excavations carried out in the early twentieth century in the grounds of the Alcazaba, along with other treasures from archaeological sites in the province, especially those of Cártama and Bobastro.

Among these treasures were the first Phoenician objects discovered in the province, which, at the time, was long before the magnitude of the phenomenon of Phoenician colonisation on the coast of Malaga was even suspected; and a valuable Roman collection of busts, sculptures and funerary pieces unearthed in Cártama.

The museum also housed the collection from the old Loringian Museum, an archaeological collection from the nineteenth century that was owned by the Marquises of Casa-Loring.

During reform works on the Alcazaba in 1996, the archaeological collection was provisionally transferred to the Convent of the Trinity, where it remained until 1999.

The collection was then stored in a building in Avenida de Europa for more than ten years, before the opening of the Malaga Museum in the Palacio de la Aduana in 2012.

The opening of the current museum integrated for the first time, the collections of the Archaeological Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts of Malaga, making it the fifth largest museum in Spain and the largest in Andalucía.

The 18,000 square metre palace has three floors and eight rooms, the first five dedicated to archaeology and the other three to fine arts.

Today, there are more than 15,000 artifacts in the archaeology collection.