National Energy Museum

The museological and museographic project produced by Transversal at the MSP power plant (Minero Suderúrgica de Ponferrada) aims to explain how this old power plant from 1914 worked and, at the same time, pay homage to the workers and to the town in the area that has lived and worked in close connection with coal mining and the production of electricity.

The MSP power plant is a building of 10,000 m2 that forms part of the National Energy Museum, promoted by the Spanish government, at Ponferrada (León), an old mining area in the process of deindustrialisation, which the project wishes to promote by creating a large museum infrastructure, making the town of Ponferrada a benchmark for tourism and industrial heritage. The project consists of the anthropological mining section of the National Energy Museum and is based at the MSP, a jewel of industrial heritage.

In this setting, audiovisual projections, animation of the installations, special effects applied to the machinery, sounds, atmospheric devices, video testimony activated by the presence of visitors and an abundance of interactive resources come together in the centre to develop the content, which is not only a proposal for technical interpretation but especially anthropological, raising awareness of the life of the people who worked in and lived off the power plant: miners, industrialists, railway workers, stokers, mechanics, welders, fitters, engineers... they and their families, a community connected to the power plant and to power plants in general, as well as to a mining region.