Sispony's Rull House Museum, a look back at life in Andorra.
During the second half of the 20 th century, many Andorran valleys became streets and their pathways were transformed into large avenues. The rural landscape has undergone a radical change. A world in which links between one place and the next were based on agriculture and livestock has given way to a fully urbanised society oriented to trade and tourism, representing a division between the Andorra of the past and that of the present. Aware of that situation, Josep Perich Puigcercós, owner of the Rull House, and the Government of Andorra signed an agreement to preserve the house as a testimony to the past, of a world that, in many cases, is now part of collective memory.
The initiative of conserving the Rull House gave rise to the idea of creating a museum. The work undertaken in this historical building has entailed a constant effort in terms of documentation and restitution, involving a full range of technical cultural heritage services, with the permanent aim of capturing and portraying the meaning and function of a house in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, prior to the circumstantial changes that altered traditional lifestyles.
The Rull House takes visitors back in time to show them the country life of an important family in the heart of the community of Sispony and La Massana. Through a discourse based on day-to-day life, visitors are familiarised with a system of production and working, with a family structure, with relationships between neighbours, with the setting of the house, with the community, with an outlook on the world; in short, with a way of life.
The first record of the family that lived in the house dates back to 1623. Various heirs subsequently went on to take their position as the head of the household.
This combined house and museum provides visitors with an entertaining, appealing, interactive insight into how life was in Andorra at the end of the 19 th century. The various aspects of Andorran life at the time in question are explained through a video shown at the start of visits, which establishes the context of the era, and then by a tour around the different parts of the house, accompanied by headphones and an interactive recording. Visitors can view the entrance to the house, the wine cellar, the tool room, the meat store, the kitchen garden, the kitchen itself, the oven used for making bread, the dining room, the family's bedrooms, etc.
In summary, this fantastic museum is unique in Andorra and offers an interesting, pleasant way of spending some time together as a family, perhaps an afternoon following a day of skiing.
