Museu Marítim (Maritime Museum)

The Museu Marítim occupies the Reials Drassanes (Royal Shipyards), a vast complex of stone-vaulted halls begun around 1283 under King Pere the Great and completed in their current form by the late 14th century, making it one of the largest and best-preserved surviving medieval shipyards anywhere in the world. For roughly 500 years, right up to the 18th century, these halls built and repaired the war galleys of the Crown of Aragon's Mediterranean fleet, launched directly from the shipyard into the sea that has since receded as the harbourfront was built up around it.

The museum's centrepiece is a full-size replica of the Royal Galley, the flagship vessel of Don John of Austria at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, one of the largest naval battles in history and a decisive Christian-alliance victory over the Ottoman fleet — the replica, built at genuine 60-metre scale inside the medieval shipbuilding hall it would have originally launched from, gives visitors an unusually direct physical sense of the scale of pre-modern naval warfare.