The Toy Museum of Catalonia was created from the personal collection of Josep Maria Joan Rosa and Pilar Casademont Sadurní. It is the fruit of the creative passion and effort of two people over the course of more than twenty-two years.

Initially, the toys occupied most of their home located on Fossos street in Figueres. The “anti-museum”, a term coined by Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán to refer to the Museum when he visited in 1972, was growing in both quality and quantity; in December of the same year, the first public exhibition of the most outstanding pieces was inaugurated at the Palau Güell in Barcelona. It was not to be the last: twenty more exhibitions took place in the seventies and eighties.

The inventories of that initial stage of collecting were published in the progressive weekly Triunfo with the title “La noche de los juguetes vivientes” (Night of the living toys) on 6 January 1973. It was the happy precursor of what took place nine years later. On 18 June 1982, the Toy Museum opened its doors in the building that had formerly housed the Hotel París, located on the main thoroughfare in Figueres. From the very beginning, the collections grew with many important donations from both anonymous benefactors and well-known personalities in the cultural field, among which the collections of Guy Selz, Alan Gass and Joan Brossa stand out.

In fact, Joan Brossa, one of the Museum’s patrons, dedicated it the “Sextina en el Museu de Joguets de Figueres” (Sestina in the Toy Museum in Figueres) in the book by the same name that was published in June 1984. The increase in items unrelated to the original collection made the constitution of a management foundation necessary: the Toy Museum of Catalonia Foundation was established in 1977, to which the founders donated their private collections. The current Museum, though it remained on the premises of the former Hotel París, was inaugurated in 1988, having been fully refurbished and adapted to ensure the correct conservation and display of the pieces.

Since then, more than nine hundred people have made donations to the Toy Museum of Catalonia. Thanks to their generosity, the Museum has become an international reference in the field of toys and games.