Since I was in the Basque part of Spain, I worked in a visit to one of very few great playing card museums in the world: the Fournier Museum of Playing Cards.
More formally, it's called the MUSEO FOURNIER DE NAIPES DE ÁLAVA. It's housed in a gorgeous palace built in the 16th Century - the Bendana Palace - which it shares with a museum of archeology.
The museum is in a stunning old palace - the Bendana Palace - built in the 16th Century. It shares with a museum of archeology. It's a free visit which is nice. In terms of jokers, the museum is pretty barren. But I loved the museum visit because of the materials on the different techniques for making cards and the presentation of some fantastically beautiful decks.
The museum started as the a private collection by Felix Alfaro Fournier. He was the heir of the Fournier card manufacturing and printing company.
The exhibits start with a very illuminating section on the history of the printing of playing cards with a video that takes visitors from the early wood cut printing, through the eras of various printing technologies. There are several examples of most of the printing technology. I was thrilled that for a brief moment, I actually understood the history of printing better than I ever have before. But, like so much, it didn't stick and their cool video about the history of printing does not seem to be online. So I can't seem to recall the key technologies or sequence.
I loved the exhibited cards. They were so interesting that I wasn't too disappointed to have made a trip to card museum which mostly features cards printed way before there were jokers with the decks (Remember, I'm primarily a joker collector). Here's a few.
I found the Fournier museum tricky because most of the displays were labelled in two languages: Basque and Spanish. I'm null in the former and not so good in Spanish either. So that was a challenge. Fortunately, the videos had a choice of languages for subtitles and English was strong. The Fournier museum is along the same lines as the Paris Card Museum. The Paris one has significantly more materials on display. Each museum favored their own country's decks which is to be expected.
I look forward to finishing the trifecta by getting myself up to Museum of the Playing Card of Turnhout, Belgium.
Festival Day! A funny thing about my visit to Fournier is that it was Thursday, July 25, 2024. This turns out to be a big holiday in Spain and in this town of Vitoria-Gasteiz, it is a big holiday. It seems, as best I could understand, that each part of town has their own traditional colors, songs, clothes, and songs. So there were huge parades of people wandering around. Very festive and exciting but a little disorienting since we're driving around with a GPS that seems unaware that much of the city is blocked.
Even walking around, we always seemed to be going against the current. Did I mention that each crowd had its own variation of marching band, a little Mariachi-ish?
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| Vitoria-Gasteiz |
Turn your audio on for this video....And then play it over and over again to get a feel for our day
Here's the welcome video of the museum. I wish they also shared on youtube their video about the history of printing technology.
