The Darder Museum of Banyoles, founded in 1916 with the collections of the naturalist Francesc d’Assís Darder, has a wide variety of objects, especially natural history objects. After the inauguration, and after Darder’s death in 1918, the catalogue was enriched with other collections, mainly from private individuals.
In addition to stuffed animals, mineral and butterfly collections, among others, there are also, albeit in smaller quantities, other items that were common in natural history museums of the time, such as: tanned human skins, skulls, plaster copies of skulls from various provenances, mummies, etc.
At present, the museum’s collection is made up of some twenty thousand pieces, of which 1,568 come from Francesc Darder, although this figure cannot be confirmed with any degree of accuracy, as no catalogue from 1916 has been found.
Most of these objects were acquired by Darder during his trips to France and England, especially in the last third of the 19th century. One of them was the body of a man of San origin, whose name we do not know, which triggered great debate in Catalan society in the 1990s, until part of his remains were returned to Botswana in 2000.
