SHARE
COPY LINK

TOURISM

How Spain’s museums are preparing to reopen in pandemic era

Madrid's Reina Sofia is preparing to reopen with new social distancing and hygiene measures in place.

How Spain's museums are preparing to reopen in pandemic era
Photo by Gabriel Buoys / AFP

The halls are eerily quiet at Madrid's Reina Sofia, Spain's most visited museum, as a solitary art restorer looks after its star attraction — Pablo Picasso's anti-war masterpiece “Guernica”.

Like all of Spain's museums, the modern art museum housed in a former hospital has been closed since mid-March due to a nationwide lockdown to contain one of the world's deadliest coronavirus outbreaks.

But with the restrictions starting to be eased, it is getting ready to reopen — hopefully in a month — with new social distancing and hygiene regulations in place for the pandemic age.

Museums must “convey the message that there is no need to fear others,” said the Reina Sofia's director, Manuel Borja-Villel.   

Visitors will move through the multi-story building on a circular path so as not to cross by one another, cameras will take people's temperature and dispensers for hand sanitiser will be distributed across the museum, he told AFP.   

Paper maps and brochures will no longer be available as they can transmit germs, and visitors will instead be able to download an info app on their own smartphones.

“There will be nothing that people can touch,” said Borja-Villel.   

After weeks of confinement, visiting museums can help to revive public life, he added.

“It is important to transmit this joy of being with others, this idea that human beings, by definition, are not alone,” he said. 

Less big exhibitions?

The Reina Sofia received 4.4 million visitors in 2019, half of them from outside Spain, but it fears it will see a 30 percent fall in revenues this year because of the coronavirus lockdown.

The government has ordered museums to restrict admissions to a third of their capacity when they do re-open to ensure social distancing rules are respected.

Borja-Villel predicts museums will have to move away from their current model based on holding a series of “big exhibitions” and adopt a more long-term strategy.

While the Reina Sofia is closed to the public, restoration work continues.    

“We must remain to ensure works remain in good shape,” said the museum's chief restorer, Jorge Garcia Gomez-Tejedor, who wore a face mask as he inspected “Guernica”, the emblematic painting depicting the horrors of Spain's 1936-39 civil war.

The Reina Sofia, along with the nearby Prado and the Thyssen museums, form a so-called “Golden Triangle of Art” which is one of the Spanish capital's top tourism draws.

Digital transformation

The Prado — Spain's national museum which is home to paintings by Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velazquez and Goya  — fears a 70 percent drop in revenues this year, said its communications director Carlos Chaguaceda.    

Around 60 percent of its visitors are foreigners, with a significant number from the United States, he added.

The Prado was already forced to reschedule all of the temporary exhibitions it had planned for this year due to problems in receiving loans of works from other museums during the pandemic, which has brought air traffic to a halt.   

At the Thyssen, the pandemic has been “a trigger for the digital transformation” at the institution, said its executive director, Evelio Acevedo.

During the lockdown the museum boosted the amount of its online content, by for example providing a virtual tour of a temporary exhibition of portraits by Dutch master Rembrandt led by the show's curator.

The “Rembrandt and Amsterdam portraiture” exhibition opened on February 18th and had initially been set to run until May 24th, but it will likely now be extended to the end of August.

This sort of free online content won't stem an expected 60 percent drop in revenues this year but they are helping to launch “a transformation process that will last years,” said Acevedo.

By AFP's Alvaro Villalobos

READ ALSO: 

 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

TRAVEL NEWS

Why are fewer British tourists visiting Spain this year?

Almost 800,000 fewer UK holidaymakers have visited Spain in 2023 when compared to 2019. What’s behind this big drop?

Why are fewer British tourists visiting Spain this year?

Spain welcomed 12.2 million UK tourists between January and July 2023, 6 percent less when compared to the same period in 2019, according to data released on Monday by Spanish tourism association Turespaña.

This represents a decrease of 793,260 British holidaymakers for Spain so far this year.

Conversely, the number of Italian (+8 percent), Irish (+15.3 percent), Portuguese (+24.8 percent), Dutch (+4 percent) and French tourists (+5 percent) visiting España in 2023 are all above the rates in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. 

German holidaymakers are together with their British counterparts the two main nationalities showing less interest in coming to Spanish shores.

Britons still represent the biggest tourist group that comes to Spain, but it’s undergoing a slump, with another recent study by Caixabank Research suggesting numbers fell particularly in June 2023 (-12.5 percent of the usual rate). 

READ ALSO: Spain fully booked for summer despite most expensive holiday prices ever

So are some Britons falling out of love with Spain? Are there clear reasons why a holiday on the Spanish coast is on fewer British holiday itineraries?

According to Caixabank Research’s report, the main reasons are “the poor macroeconomic performance of the United Kingdom, the sharp rise in rates and the weakness of the pound”.

This is evidenced in the results of a survey by British market research company Savanta, which found that one in six Britons are not going on a summer holiday this year due to the UK’s cost-of-living crisis.

Practically everything, everywhere has become more expensive, and that includes holidays in Spain: hotel stays are up 44 percent, eating out is 13 percent pricier, and flights are 40 percent more on average. 

READ ALSO: How much more expensive is it to holiday in Spain this summer?

Caixabank stressed that another reason for the drop in British holidaymakers heading to Spain is that those who can afford a holiday abroad are choosing “more competitive markets” such as Turkey, Greece and Portugal. 

And there’s no doubt that the insufferably hot summer that Spain is having, with four heatwaves so far, has also dissuaded many holidaymakers from Blighty from overcooking in the Spanish sun. 

With headlines such as “This area of Spain could become too hot for tourists” or “tourists say it’s too hot to see any sights” featuring in the UK press, budding British holidaymakers are all too aware of the suffocating weather conditions Spain and other Mediterranean countries are enduring. 

Other UK outlets have urged travellers to try out the cooler Spanish north rather than the usual piping hot Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol destinations.

Another UK poll by InsureandGo found that 71 percent of the 2,000+ British respondents thought that parts of Europe such as Spain, Greece and Turkey will be too hot to visit over summer by 2027.

There’s further concern that the introduction in 2024 of the new (and delayed) ETIAS visa for non-EU visitors, which of course now also applies to UK nationals, could further compel British tourists to choose countries to holiday in rather than Spain.

READ MORE: Will British tourists need to pay for a visa waiver to enter Spain?

However, a drop in the number of British holidaymakers may not be all that bad for Spain, even though they did spend over €17 billion on their Spanish vacations in 2022. 

Towns, cities and islands across the country have been grappling with the problem of overtourism and the consequences it has on everything from quality of life for locals to rent prices. 

READ ALSO: ‘Beach closed’ – Fake signs put up in Spain’s Mallorca to dissuade tourists

The overcrowded nature of Spain’s beaches and most beautiful holiday hotspots appears to be one of the reasons why Germans are visiting Spain in far fewer numbers. A recent report in the country’s most read magazine Stern asked “if the dream is over” in their beloved Mallorca.

Spanish authorities are also seeking to overhaul the cheaper holiday package-driven model that dominates many resorts, which includes moving away from the boozy antics of young British and other European revellers.

Fewer tourists who spend more are what Spain is theoretically now looking for, and the rise in American, Japanese and European tourists other than Brits signify less of a dependence on the British market, one which tends to maintain the country’s tourism status quo for better or for worse.

SHOW COMMENTS