What the Night Watch is to the Rijksmuseum, the Mataró model is to the Maritime Museum
This ship model is the only three-dimensional representation of a freighter from the 15th century, an important source of knowledge about late medieval shipbuilding. According to tradition, the model comes from a chapel in Mataró, a coastal town north of Barcelona, from which the model takes its name. It is one of the oldest ship models in Western Europe, if not in the world, being made in the early 15th century and thus 600 years old. The model is unique because of its age and technical accuracy.
The ship model is a representation of a seaworthy freighter, as it frequently sailed the seas between 1350 and 1500 in and from Europe. This is the type of ship on which Christopher Columbus sailed in 1492 and discovered America, as well as the type of ship on which Ferdinand Magellan made the first ever circumnavigation of the world in 1519-1521. The type of ship that our Mataró model proposes was about 18 meters long and 9 meters wide and had a draft of about 4 meters. A ship like this could carry about 100 tons of cargo.
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