SANAHUJA’S MUSEUM VISIT

The most expected day finally arrived! On Saturday 25th of February, right in the middle of Carnival Celebration, we went deep into a unique museum stablished in Spain related to amusement machines (Arcade, Pinballs, Slot machines…). This museum, located on a main street in Terrassa (Barcelona) is Jaume Sanahuja’s private collection. Jaume Sanahuja is the owner of MGA, a man whose childhood was surrounded by these fantastic machines because his father, Juan Sanahuja, was an operator.

 Foto del libro Del Juego al Ocio de J.Sanahuja

After this short introduction, let’s go into details. The museum is located on the ground floor of one of the Golden Park of the MGA group. The access is a small door that goes unnoticed when you walk along the street. Right after a smashing entrance you find the stairs down, decorated on both sides of the wall with many pinball flyers from the 50s and 60s, old shooting galleries and early 80s arcades. All of these machines were manufactured by Spanish companies, most of them disappeared long time ago.

Once we finished going downstairs we found a small bar set on 60’s which is mainly used as a Hall on which we found some snacks and drinks already served. Let’s move to the museum itself…

The main entrance starts with two rows of Jukebox from different eras, faultless and almost brand new. Every jukebox (like all the other machines of the museum) is labelled with its corresponding year of manufacturing, company and origin country.

We keep on walking and we bump into Spanish-made jukebox of companies such as Gedasa, Petaco, Famaresa, Inder…

At the end of the corridor, when the jukebox section ends, we find some slot machines based on characters from old western films.

In the next corridor we can see the slot machines and noticed that they are sorted the same way as Jukebox machines, starting by the ones manufactured at the beginning of past century and, as we keep on walking, we bump into the ones made in Spain, starting by a “Coin Waterfall” from 1978 made by Sanahuja.

We moved on and we reached to the room which we liked the most, full of 80’s shooting galleries, pinballs and arcades. This area was somewhere where people could have their best time as they could play pretty much everything

Two pinballs in particular catch our attention, the first two pinballs that Petaco made when it was founded in 1962. Although on the sign it is read that were from the 70’s, both pinballs are from the early 60’s

The pinballs and arcades area was the end of the tour, we return where we started, the main hallbar. We enjoyed the visit with our friends from the Retromaniacs association. Among the attendees, we meet Joaquin Falgas (“Falgas amusement rides”), Jose Estévez (who designed and manufactured the first “coin waterfall” in Spain with Santiago Laguna), the Juni brothers (Miquel & Joan, Ingematic co.), Óscar Delgado (“Joc Privat” magazine) and the creator of this magnificent museum Mr. Jaume Sanahuja. To finish this article, we leave you a “tour video” from one of A.R.C.A.D.E. members. Thank you all the people who work hard making Arcade Museums like this exist