Ferrowhite Museum-Workshop (El Castillo)

About this place

Ferrowhite is a «museum-workshop» in Ingeniero White, the port of Bahía Blanca, housed in part of a building locals call «the Castle»: the old General San Martín power station, with castle-style towers and facade, which supplied electricity to the port, the city and nearby towns for more than fifty years. The museum began with tools rescued by railway workers when the rail workshops were privatised and dismantled in the 1990s: hammers, lathes, tongs, saws and whetstones. From them it explains how the workshops ran and how port and railway workers lived, through photographs and recorded stories. It really is a workshop, where craftspeople and artists make new things from old. Nearby is the community-run Port Museum, where neighbourhood cooks serve cakes at weekends. Entry is free, hours differ between summer and winter, and the site looks out over the port's docks and sunsets.