The Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo, commonly known as MARCO, occupies a panopticon building refurbished in 1995, located in the heart of the city centre, which was previously used as a courthouse and prison. In 1990 it was declared an Asset of Cultural Interest. Various activities and thematic exhibitions are held in this museum.
This 19th-century building was created as a result of the city of Vigo's need for a public prison. Thus, on 16 May 1861, the Ministry approved the construction of the new prison. What was originally intended to be a simple prison, ended up becoming a Palace of Justice with courts, prisons and a small hostel for the guards, whose construction was completed in 1880.
Exactly a century later, the City Council planned to demolish this building to build a tree-lined square in its place, but after the strong rejection of this new project by the architects Álvaro Siza Vieira and Javier Sáenz de Oiza and the professor of Art History at the Escuela Superior de Madrid, Pedro Navascués Palacio, on 6 October 1990 the General Directorate of Heritage of the Regional Government of Galicia declared the building an Asset of Cultural Interest.
In 1995 the project for the rehabilitation of this building was awarded to the team of architects from Vigo Salvador Fraga Rivas, Francisco Javier García-Quijada Romero and Manuel Portolés Sanjuán. After years of work and more than 2 million euros invested in the refurbishment, the Museum was inaugurated in 2002.
This irregular hexagonal building has four large glass-roofed rooms (which were formerly interior courtyards), as well as a central square where the chapel used to be located. Its main façade, which overlooks Príncipe street (the old Orense road), is notable for its slenderness and the high plinth that runs along it.
The museum, which is owned by the municipality, was inaugurated on 13 November 2002 and covers 10,007 square metres, of which 3,500 square metres are used for exhibition rooms.
It was created with the aim of conserving, researching and exhibiting works of art, with its priorities being the production, training, communication and dissemination of contemporary culture. It is a centre with a multidisciplinary programme open to all current artistic media, oriented towards the knowledge of art and culture.
MARCO is part of the Spanish Network of Museums. The collaboration model of the network is the Strategic Association of Museums, which enables management models with a structured and standardised character. Among the premises of this alliance are the co-production of exhibitions, the creation of joint programmes, the exchange of experiences and information and the loan of heritage deposits.
On 13 November 2007, MARCO celebrated its fifth anniversary with "Tempo ao tempo", a commemorative exhibition on the passage of time that, for the first time, occupied the museum's two sidewalks and the annex space. The exhibition was considered by the magazine El Cultural as one of the ten best exhibitions held in Spain in 2007.