Benidorm Town Hall is to open an archaeology room in the Boca del Calvari municipal museum to exhibit for the first time and permanently its archaeological collection, a room which will also bear the name of the priest and historian Lluís Duart i Alabart. Benidorm mayor Toni Pérez, announced that the opening of this new exhibition space will take place next Sunday, 28 July, at 13.00 coinciding with the celebration of International Archaeology Day.
Before that, at 11.30, the council will also proceed to the naming of the passageway that joins the squares of Castelar and La Senyoria, in El Castell, with the name of Lluís Duart i Alabarta. In this way, the councill will comply with two plenary agreements unanimously approved in 2010 and 2013 and, in turn, “settles a historical debt that this town and this council had with the man who was parish priest in Benidorm for more than 30 years, recognising and giving value to everything that Lluís Duart contributed to us with his passion for history and archaeology,” said Toni Pérez.
This new room will house a permanent exhibition which will display pieces from the Benidorm council’s museum collection, ranging from the Neolithic to the 20th century, “many of which have never been exhibited before,” said the mayor.
Among the pieces that can be seen in this space are many from the Tossal de la Cala, and among them, some of those located by Don Lluís Duart himself, during the excavations he carried out at this site, added the mayor.
Toni Pérez said that the fact that this room is named after Lluís Duart gives it even greater significance, recalling the important contribution that this priest made to the municipality, both in the field of archaeology, with his excavations and research on the Tossal, and in the field of local and ecclesiastical history. With regard to the latter, the councillor recalled that “Pere Maria Orts i Bosch himself, historian and official chronicler of Benidorm, when he finished all his work, which led to the publication in 1964 of the ‘Arribada d’una imatge de la Verge a Benidorm’, thanked Don Luis Duart for his work and interest in developing this research”.
