The Maristan Project is dedicated to documenting the medieval Islamic hospitals that connect and testify to the transmission of knowledge from the Mashreq across the Maghreb into the Iberian Peninsula. From the Persian word ‘bimaristan’ – meaning ‘place for the sick’ – the maristans occupy a unique place in history for being the first buildings to provide an early form of institutionalized care for those most in need, including the ill, old, poor, and mentally unstable. Michel Foucault refers to the medieval hospitals in Spain as the precursors of the modern mental asylum.

The purpose of the Maristan Project is to provide an open-source digital repository of knowledge, centralizing as much information about maristans possible, and to disseminate this knowledge about these unique edifices as widely as possible for others to get insights into their respective shared cultural heritage related to some of our earliest hospitals. The ambition of this project is broadly to raise public awareness and ultimately to encourage interest amongst municipalities and ministries to preserve, restore, and promote the maristans that remain standing today.