Sepúlveda Museums
Sepúlveda It features five museums and interpretation centers where visitors can enjoy and, above all, learn about the town’s rich cultural and natural heritage. The Museo de los Fueros, the Old Jail Interpretation Center, the Lope Tablada Museum, the Fijas Museum, and the Hoces del Río Duratón Natural Park Interpretation Center (also known as the Casa del Parque).
When judicial districts were created in 1834, it was renamed the District Prison, a period during which some renovations were carried out. A good part of the facilities that have reached us today are almost the same as those that existed back then.
Of its three floors, the lower and upper ones were always intended for use as a prison, while the middle one is the one that has undergone the most modifications and changes in use. It was the Town Hall until a new one was built on the other side of the square in 1870, after which it became the residence of the prison warden until its final closure. Subsequently, it was renovated to host cultural activities.
The building, covering about 400 square metres, was refurbished in 2014 to house a permanent exhibition of a didactic and informative nature that showcases the use and lifestyles in this type of prison, along with their social and historical implications. The concept of the deprivation of liberty, whether as forced captivity or voluntary seclusion, guides the tour, and visitors will also experience and learn how prisoners lived, how justice was administered, and the customs and social practices related to past centuries.
The message is adapted to ensure understanding across different population sectors and ages, with special attention given to schoolchildren. The interactive approach of panels that visitors must open facilitates a sensory and direct experience, which is intensified by sound and visual environmental recreations and projectable models.
To capture the attention of children, special care has been taken in creating educational games, prism puzzles with positive messages about freedom, and a multimedia game that challenges them to plan an escape from the prison, overcoming all the barriers presented between the cell and the street.
Lighting also plays a fundamental role in recreating specific atmospheres.
Three floors
The content is distributed along a route through the three floors, from bottom to top. On the ground floor, in addition to the history of the building, is the starting point of this journey into the idea of the body as a prison for the soul, just as mystics like Saint Teresa of Jesus and ascetics like Saint Jerome may have felt it.
Next, literature written behind or about bars takes centre stage, with excerpts from Fray Luis de León, Cervantes, Miguel Hernández, Quevedo, Jovellanos, or Saint John of the Cross, which visitors can read on a tablet, like a virtual library. This level completes its information with a model of Sepúlveda and an audiovisual installation, which provide the necessary tourist information to make the most of the visit and get to know the town well.
On the first floor, the various forms of seclusion are addressed, including that of women, honour imprisoned in palaces and noble houses that reveal themselves as a noble prison, the education designed to keep women in the private sphere for long periods of history, and the ways of avoiding this gender-based confinement. Also on this level is the cell of the spirit, with the voluntary seclusion of monks and hermits who seek the salvation of the soul through solitude, prayer, work, and the repression of instinct; this includes examples of different monastic orders and hermits, such as Saint Frutos.
This level concludes with walled cities, seen as a civic prison of life within the walls, and jails and prisons conceived as spaces of punishment for the commission of crimes.
And the third and final floor faithfully reflects what life was like in the prison of the town of Sepúlveda during the last two centuries and in each of its spaces: men's cells, women's cells, the dungeon, the bathrooms, and the guard and administration room, as well as the relationship between prisoners and jailers. It is in this area where the visitor will be able to easily step into the shoes of the building's former inhabitants.
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