Do you Need to Book Tickets in Advance for the Museum of the History of Barcelona (MUHBA)?

Yes MUHBA is definitely worth a visit, and in my opinion it's significantly undervisited relative to its quality. The MUHBA at Plaça del Rei consistently ranks as one of Barcelona's most rewarding museums among visitors who have been, but it draws far smaller crowds than the Sagrada Família, the Picasso Museum, or Park Güell. On a weekday morning, the underground ruins can feel close to private.

The museum works on two registers simultaneously: below ground is archaeology and physical immersion in the Roman city; above ground is medieval architecture and accumulated centuries of political history. Together they provide the deepest available account of how Barcelona came to be the city it is, and visiting the MUHBA early in a Barcelona trip gives the rest of the city's streets and buildings a context and a legibility that no other single experience in the city can match.

The underground archaeological site is the centrepiece and the most immediately extraordinary element. Descending by lift from the Casa Padellàs entrance into the basement, visitors walk on raised glass walkways through a preserved section of the Roman city of Barcino as it existed between the first century BC and the seventh century AD. The site covers over 4,000 square metres, making it the largest Roman archaeological site in situ in Europe outside Rome itself, and the remains are remarkably complete and legible. You walk above the preserved floors of a Roman laundry (fullonica), where cloth was trodden and whitened, past the tanks of a fish-salting and garum factory (garum being the fermented fish sauce that was one of Rome's primary condiment exports across the Empire), past a wine press and storage vessels, past the interior of a Roman house with its atrium and storage rooms, past sections of the Roman city wall, and through the remains of Barcelona's first Christian community, including what is believed to be the earliest Christian baptistery in Catalonia. Blue light strips running along the floor indicate the original boundaries of Roman streets, so that even where the buildings are fragmentary, you can understand the urban grid you are moving through.

The material ranges from the purely structural (walls, floors, drainage channels) to the intimately domestic: dye vats stained with the residue of their last use nearly two thousand years ago, the distribution channels of a Roman water supply, the threshold stones of doorways worn smooth by feet that last crossed them in the third century. The experience is one of the closest encounters with a genuinely lived Roman city available to any visitor in Europe.

The Saló del Tinell, reached from the underground via stairs or lift, is the great ceremonial hall of the Palau Reial Major, the former royal palace of the Counts of Barcelona and later the Kings of Aragon. Built between 1359 and 1370 for King Peter III (the Ceremonious) by the master builder Guillem Carbonell, it is one of the finest examples of Catalan Gothic secular architecture in existence: a vast barrel-vaulted hall of six semicircular stone arches spanning 17 metres without columns, the largest unsupported medieval hall in Catalonia. This is the room where, in 1493, Fernando and Isabel received Christopher Columbus on his return from his first voyage to the Americas, the moment at which the known world changed. Standing in the Tinell with this history in mind, in a room that has not substantially changed since that conversation took place, is one of the more quietly staggering experiences Barcelona offers.

The Chapel of Santa Àgata, at one end of the Saló del Tinell, is a 14th-century royal palatine chapel built by James II of Aragon over a section of the Roman wall. Its centrepiece is the altarpiece of the Constable, painted by Jaume Huguet in 1465, depicting the Adoration of the Magi with the constable Pedro of Portugal and his court as donors. Huguet is the master of the Catalan Gothic school of painting, and this altarpiece is one of his finest surviving works, hanging in the chapel for which it was commissioned, in a setting as close to its original context as any altarpiece in Spain. The chapel tower, the Mirador del Rei Martí, rises above the complex but has been closed to visitors in recent periods; check the current status at the ticket desk on arrival.

Casa Padellàs is the entrance building of the museum and a remarkable piece of urban history in its own right. A 15th-century Gothic private palace that originally stood on Carrer dels Mercaders in the Gothic Quarter, it was moved stone by stone to its current location on Plaça del Rei in 1931 when the construction of Via Laietana would otherwise have demolished it. The move was the first major stone-by-stone relocation of a historic building in Barcelona, and it was during the reconstruction of its foundations in their new location that the Roman ruins beneath the plaza were first discovered. The upper floors of Casa Padellàs now hold the Barcelona Flashback: Historical Synthesis permanent exhibition, a panoramic overview of two thousand years of Barcelona's history told through documents, objects, architecture, and landscape photography.