"In the sixties, when I was a child, I lived in a house located in the lower part of Mataró, very close to the sea. I really liked going to the beach after storms. There was everything: logs, small rounded pieces of colored glass... and shells and small snails. I used to collect shells and snails," explains Alfons Palau. "When I spent a few days in Galicia, I took the opportunity to go to the beaches and collect sand brought by the waves, which contained many small snails. Since it took time to find them, I decided to take that sand from the Atlantic home, to the Mediterranean, and thus observe it calmly and sort out snails and shells. I could spend months observing a bag of sand. I did it with a binocular magnifying glass, and the result was very effective." The collection is composed of approximately 93,000 items. They are saltwater snails and shells, freshwater (from rivers, lakes, and ponds), land snails, and fossil snails and shells. "When we had covid-19, I took advantage of the confinement to review and inventory the entire collection," she recalls.Alfons decided to donate the collection to a museum, as no one in the family intended to continue it. He didn't want it to be lost. "I looked for natural science museums nearby and found the one in Granollers. They came to see the collection and confirmed that they would keep it. They took it away recently." It is now at the Granollers Museum of Natural Sciences, well documented: for each piece, its name, the family it belongs to, the place where it was found, and the date are written.