The Municipal Museum is in the Municipal Gardens, and used to be the house of the "Arucas Estate", built at the start of the 19th century and bought by Don Alfonso Gourié Álvarez in 1859, after the estate was dissolved. From then on, it was known as the "Gourié House". It is now council property and houses exhibition rooms, a museum, the tourist board office, the cleaning service and an assembly hall. It is surrounded by a beautiful garden.

In 1947, the Council Management Committee, chaired by José Henríquez Pitti, embarked upon the process of acquiring part of the Gourié gardens. The owners intended to build on the site, and the Council rapidly declared both the land and the Gourié mansion of public interest, starting the first expropriation procedure.

On June 23, 1948, the day before the festivity of the patron saint, St. John, the parish priest blessed the gardens, now a Municipal Park, and the area was opened to the public. Some time later, the Council, chaired by Francisco Ferrera Rosales and later by Manuel Pérez y Pérez, acquired the remaining third of the land, including the building and its back garden. This project was finally completed in 1976, when the different rooms in the house were transformed into exhibition centres with permanent exhibits of the work of Santiago Santana, Manolo Ramos, Guillermo Sureda and Abraham Cárdenes and his students.