The Garrotxa Museum, on Carrer Hospici in the old centre of Olot, is the regional history and art museum and the home of the canonical collection of the Escola d'Olot — the 19th-century landscape painters who made the local light famous. Joaquim Vayreda, Modest Urgell, and Josep Berga i Boix all painted here, working outdoors in the manner of the French Barbizon school and creating images of the Garrotxa countryside that helped shape Catalan visual culture.
The museum also covers the long-standing local industry in religious imagery — Olot was, and still is, one of the main centres in Catalonia for the production of carved saints and Nativity figures. The collection of 19th- and 20th-century imagery is large and oddly affecting. The building itself, a 18th-century hospital, is a fine example of Catalan civil architecture.