Gernika Museum invites you to talk and reflect about peace.

I didn’t expect the experience to hit me as deeply as it did, even though I knew exactly where I was going and what histories I’d be walking into. Standing in the Gernika Peace Museum, I couldn’t help but think of my grandmother. Her stories of famine, of working cleaning for people she didn't like, of being quiet, still, and not trust many people during the years of the dictatorship. Though my family is from the south, far from the bombing of Gernika, we still lived under the same dark sky and nside the museum, those memories seemed to echo back through time.

What struck me first was how people outside Spain don't know much about the civil war and the almost 40 years of dictatorship, which happen not even a hundred years ago, yet everyone knows Guernica, Picasso’s painting. They know the image, a bit of the story behind it, but not the lives it represents. The painting often stands as an abstract symbol of suffering, detached from the human narratives that gave it meaning. The Gernika Peace Museum, however, resists that detachment. It turns the gaze away from Picasso’s modernist canvas and towards the lived experience of ordinary people. Bravo. It functions less as a site of display and more as a “pedagogic space”, a museum that teaches empathy through affect and experience, not simply through objects. Let me tell you more about it.

The first impression is far from peaceful. What you encounter is raw, uncomfortable, and deliberately disorienting. Photographs, objects, testimonies: war, destruction, grief. One room, designed like a grandmother’s living room, plays the recorded voice of Begoña narrating her day before the bombing. Then the light shifts, and what seemed like a mirror becomes a window into rubble: the ruins of the same home. This moment transforms the visitor from observer to witness, collapsing temporal distance.

Walking over ruins becomes a literal act of remembrance, of carrying the weight of the past underfoot, of confronting what remains. The museum’s use of testimony anchors this emotional encounter. Real voices, photographs, and video interviews fill the galleries. Survivors speak with fragile calm, describing what they saw, who they lost, how they rebuilt. These oral histories, these living archives, do the interpretive work that objects alone cannot. They animate the institution’s pedagogical mission: not to aestheticise trauma but to make it comprehensible, to show that peace must be actively constructed from the wreckage of violence.

The museum relies heavily on text, much of it in Basque and Spanish with some grammar slips, with translations provided in loose sheets you carry from room to room. It’s not the most accessible form of engagement, but perhaps that friction is intentional? It slows you down, forcing a more active participation.

Yet what makes this museum powerful is its refusal to centre only on conflict. It uses history to ask how peace is built, how communities move forward after destruction. In this sense, it embodies the “difficult heritage” museum: an institution that confronts painful pasts not as closed chapters, but as living dialogues. Gernika town today feels like a phoenix, reborn, calm, and full of life. The museum doesn’t preach revenge; it teaches reconstruction. It offers examples of peacebuilding across the world, creating a network of resilience that transcends national identity.

Still, I left thinking the museum could go further. Its message of peace deserves renewal and recontextualisation, to connect with today’s conflicts, migrations, and social divisions. How can a museum about the past remain relevant in the present? Perhaps through collaboration with artists, current community voices, and contemporary interventions that question what peace looks like now (but without displaying what was the only contemporary artwork between the stairs and the wall blocking the view). Because we, still, need more peace. More visuals, more participation, more risk. Because peace, like memory, is never static, it is something we continue to build, negotiate, and imagine together.