MADRID: With their fingertips, Marina and Jose Pedro pored over a small-scale model of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia church in an exhibition which allows the blind to discover some of the world’s best-known monuments.

“There are just so many tiny details! And what a strange roof,” enthused Jose Pedro Gonzalez as he explored the wooden replica of Gaudi’s spectacular basilica. Marina Rojas said that she “never imagined the Sagrada Familia like that”.

“It’s very surprising, because you get a general idea of what the monument is like, what the space inside is like,” she added. The Madrid Typhlological Museum — from the Greek “tuphlos” meaning blind — houses 37 reproductions of global monuments that are listed as world heritage sites.

It was set up in 1992 by ONCE, Spain’s powerful national organisation for the blind which has 71,000 members. Made of wood, stone, metal or resin, the models are accessible to all visitors — whether blind, sighted or partially sighted — giving them a hands-on, sensory experience of the architecture.

“There’s no other place in the world with a museum like this,” said guide Mireia Rodriguez, who is herself visually impaired.

“There are many other museums designed for visually impaired visitors, but they don’t have this kind of collection.” ONCE runs a lottery and some very popular scratch card games which bring in $2.7 billion a year

and pays the salaries of its 72,000 employees, six out of 10 of whom have some sort of disability.

Published in Dawn, August 8th, 2024