Continuing to promote tickets or “suicide”: the dilemma of Spanish museums within the face of customer data | Culture | EUROtoday

“Visiting the museum cannot be like riding the subway during rush hour.” The director of the Prado, Miguel Falomir, resorted to this simile to attempt to clarify what the state of affairs of the museum could turn into if it continues to interrupt customer data just like the one in 2025, when it reached 3.5 million. Evelio Acevedo, supervisor of the Thyssen Museum, emphasizes the thought and factors out the trail of those cultural establishments: “The quality of the visit has to set the tone, anything else is suicide.” They each agree that they can’t match “one more visitor.”

That different factor Acevedo refers to is constant to promote tickets continuous. Although the 2 managers attempt to analyze the state of affairs the Louvre goes by in the intervening time, they appear straight at their French colleague as if it had been a crystal ball that provided them their rapid future.

The conclusion is that they don’t need to attain the important state of collapse of the Parisian artwork gallery. They need to keep away from in any respect prices that the most effective factor an individual can see of their rooms is, with luck, the reflection of a murals on the cellular display of the customer in entrance of them.

Acevedo has skilled it in museums in different international locations which, he says, are monumental references for him. “It is a disappointment to enter and not find out anything because of all the people there. In the temporary exhibition rooms it is particularly unapproachable, it is not enjoyable.” For this motive, he considers it “absurd” that in these instances the target of those facilities is to develop numerically. The Thyssen has exceeded a million guests, the second highest quantity in its historical past, behind 2023. It was exactly that 12 months after they realized that their enterprise couldn’t be sustained solely by ticket gross sales.

What occurred in 2023? Visitor numbers after confinement and the return to what was known as the brand new regular started to get better in most Spanish museums. It was then that Thyssen permitted a five-year plan, in pressure, to enhance the standard of visits with initiatives similar to setting an entry time or guaranteeing that there aren’t any teams on weekends or at sure instances of upper quantity.

In the Prado, a plan is being ready for this 12 months through which, in response to Falomir, variables such because the optimization of the exhibition house are being studied, which from 2028 shall be expanded with the inauguration of the Salón de Reinos, nonetheless below building, which is able to acquire 2,500 extra sq. meters. “We will also have to resize the size of the visiting groups, rethink the accesses so that so many people do not accumulate in some…”, listed, with out specifying, the director of the Prado.

The Reina Sofía Museum exemplifies an intermediate state of affairs between the urgency of implementing a containment plan and that of these native museums that, for the second, are comfortably managing the annual will increase in guests. In 2025, this modern artwork middle acquired 1,601,732 guests to its important headquarters, virtually 65,000 greater than the earlier 12 months, which represents a rise of 4.2% in comparison with 2024, though it stays beneath its highest marks, over 1.7 million.

“With the new opening of the fourth floor, it is planned to incorporate a specific public reception area that will allow better organization of flows and attention to visitors,” they clarify from the Reina Sofía. “This year the garden and the Velázquez Palace will be reopened, which will contribute to diversifying the visiting spaces and better distributing the influx.” And, in all probability, to extend visits. In addition, they perform inner studies with knowledge on how individuals behave as soon as they enter the museum, thus, they’ve applied time slots in the course of the days of free entry in 2025 and which, since January, have been utilized to all visiting days, to scale back the wait on the entrances.

More and extra overseas vacationers

The enhance in tourism, which between January and November 2025 added 91.48 million overseas vacationers to Spain, has a direct impression on the annual stability of those that enter, particularly, the big Spanish museums. In the case of the Reina Sofía, it continues to extend to 61.1% of whole guests, in response to its newest examine from 2024; in Prado, 75.85%, with latest knowledge; in Thyssen, simply over 50%, says Acevedo.

“It is not a problem right now, the day we really face massive and extreme tourism we will have to study it,” Segade mentioned in an interview in EL PAÍS.

Most of the foreigners flow into by the rooms of the everlasting collections. They swirl within the Guernica (amongst those that go to the museum for the primary time, 97.9% find yourself there, in response to knowledge from the Reina Sofía), within the Las Meninas and Bosch. This, in Falomir’s phrases, takes strain off them relating to time scheduling. That is, they don’t seem to be within the struggle to program blockbustersthese exhibitions that compensate you the field workplace and the annual balances. “Another absurdity,” Acevedo reiterates, “we must have another vision of museums, one like the Thyssen, with the diverse and rich collection that we have, cannot rely only on big and well-known names, our mission is to disseminate and make the collection known and transmit knowledge.”

Temporal programming and geographical location is the asset that different museums have discovered to turn into a sort of laboratory through which to experiment with the standard of the go to. In the community of CaixaForum facilities they’ve created a brand new map of audiences that enables them to research who they attain with the intention of creating themselves as a cultural complement. “The objective is to be a space that is part of the lives of people in the city,” says Marta Vallejo, director of the Territory and Centers space of ​​the la Caixa Foundation, concentrating on a nationwide and native viewers. “We are at 13% foreign audiences,” he provides. To obtain this, they make an incredible dedication to the mediation service as a device that ensures entry to tradition for anybody.

“In 2025 we have exceeded 1,300,000 as in the previous two years, figures similar to 2017 and 2018, even the year of the Guggenheim’s inauguration,” remembers Begoña Martínez Goyenaga, deputy director of Communication and Marketing on the Bilbao museum. “We are not worried about a tremendous increase, nor about closing the year with a small decrease.” Thanks to the promotion of on-line ticket gross sales and an evaluation of the seasons through which essentially the most guests come to this middle, which often coincides with vacation intervals, they’ve managed to regulate the move of holiday makers to keep away from saturation of an viewers that’s made up of 69% overseas attendees.

The similar guests who select this metropolis for tourism arrive on the MUSAC in León: 10% foreigners. In 2025 they welcomed 116,217 individuals, a rise of 33.8% in comparison with 2024, a lot of them attracted by such related names because the Asian artist Ai Weiwei and Yoko Ono. “Right now we are embarking on a research project with the universities of León, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Córdoba to analyze the cultural impact on our public. This should serve as a starting point for a broader reflection, in which we must not forget that we facilitate access to a fundamental right, such as access to culture,” says Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, the director of the museum.

None of the managers consulted are contemplating, for now, the very restrictive limitation of capability, the rise in ticket costs by nationality, or the closure of sure rooms as individuals accumulate in them. Spanish museums, for the second, stay in an evaluation part previous to the development of cultural retaining partitions.