This paper describes the journey through France, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Belgium that was undertaken in August and September 1882 by Manuel Bartolome Cossio, the foremost Spanish educationist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in order to examine European education museums and schools with a view to preparing himself for the directorship of the Museo Pedagogico Nacional of Madrid, which he would occupy in December 1883. Cossio described this experience in a diary and a notebook in which he recorded his opinion of the institutions and educationists he visited in Paris, Berne, Zurich, Munich, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne and Brussels; the former included the Ecole Alsacienne in Paris and the Padagogium in Vienna, and the latter Friedrich Dittes, Henriette Breymann and Alexis Sluys. Not only do Cossio's notes illustrate his personality and provide a subjective snapshot of the state of European education museums in the early 1880s; this tour is a paradigm of one way in which educational ideas and practices were propagated throughout nineteenth-century Europe by discriminating observers whose accounts served to open new horizons and legitimise educational innovation. Cossio found no ideal model for the Madrid museum, but what he saw moulded a project of transnational inspiration by combining autochthonous Spanish initiatives with the most fruitful trends developed in other European cultures that was to exert a profound influence on Spanish education. (Contains 1 figure, 2 tables and 45 footnotes.)