The exhibition of Pere Rossell’s nautical chart now has an opening date

From June 26th at 7:30 p.m. at the Museo de Mallorca, the map will be available to all residents of Mallorca.

The Consell de Mallorca will inaugurate this Friday, June 26, at 7:30 p.m., the exhibition “Pere Rossell’s Nautical Chart, 1447. The World Drawn for Navigation” at the Museum of Mallorca. The opening ceremony will be presided over by the president of the institution, Llorenç Galmés, and the vice president and councillor for Culture and Heritage, Antònia Roca.

The exhibition allows the public to view for the first time the illuminated portolan chart of the Mediterranean world signed by the Mallorcan cartographer Pere Rossell—also known as Petrus Roselli—in 1447. It is considered the oldest surviving work among the ten known navigation charts by the author and one of the most valuable pieces of the Mallorcan School of Cartography, which flourished on the island between the 13th and 15th centuries.

The Consell de Mallorca acquired this exceptional piece earlier this year at Sotheby's in London for €882,000, after learning that the auction house was putting this document up for international sale. The island institution, considering it a unique opportunity to recover a work of extraordinary historical and cultural value, negotiated its purchase directly. The transaction received approval from the Classification, Valuation, and Export Board of Spanish Historical Heritage under the Ministry of Culture, which deemed the acquisition of interest for the collections of the Museo de Mallorca and confirmed the appropriateness of the agreed price.

The chart, which had remained in a private collection for more than four decades, thus returns to Mallorca more than five hundred years after its creation, becoming part of the island’s public heritage.

The portolan chart is a large-format document made on vellum (56 × 94 cm), written in Latin and Catalan. Drawn in brown ink, it contains hundreds of place names written in small Gothic script in black and red, and it served as a fundamental navigation tool in the Middle Ages. Its state of preservation and illuminated character make it an exceptional testimony to the geographical knowledge and technical mastery of medieval Mallorcan cartographers.

The exhibition will be open to the public at the Museo de Mallorca until September 13th, after which it will be stored for several months to ensure its proper conservation. The museum is open to the public on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.