Musée Saint-Raymond, Toulouse

The Musée Saint-Raymond is the archaeology museum of Toulouse, in a sixteenth-century brick college on Place Saint-Sernin beside the Romanesque Basilica of Saint-Sernin. It is best known for Roman sculpture from the villa of Chiragan and suits history lovers, families and anyone visiting the basilica.

A hospital, a college, then a museum

Around 1075 to 1080 Raymond Gayrard founded a hospital on this spot for the poor and for pilgrims on the Way of Saint James, paid for by the counts of Toulouse. After a fire in the thirteenth century the site was rebuilt and later became a college for poor students. The present building dates from 1523 and is the work of the mason Louis Privat. The city bought it in 1836, Viollet-le-Duc restored it between 1868 and 1871, and it opened as a museum on 24 April 1892. It became the city's archaeology museum in 1949 and reopened on 8 May 1999 after about four years of renovation.

Emperors' busts from the Roman villa of Chiragan

The core of the collection comes from the Roman villa of Chiragan at Martres-Tolosane, south of Toulouse, excavated between 1826 and 1830. It includes a long series of portrait busts of emperors and their families, statues of gods, and a cycle of marble reliefs of the Labours of Hercules. Together they form one of the largest groups of Roman sculpture in France.

Other rooms hold Iron Age gold torques, Greek and Etruscan objects, and early Christian and early medieval sculpture, inscriptions and jewellery. In the basement, part of a late antique necropolis with its sarcophagi is shown where it was found during the 1990s works.

Gaulois mais Romains ! until January 2027

The temporary exhibition Gaulois mais Romains ! (Gauls but Romans!) runs until 3 January 2027 and looks at how the people of Gaul became part of the Roman world. The museum also runs family weekends and themed days. It manages several archaeological sites around the city: the Roman rampart, the Roman amphitheatre at Toulouse-Purpan, Roman baths and the archaeological crypt of Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines.