Living museums: ‘self-service’ galleries for tourists visiting emptied Spain

In emptied Spain, museums are alive. Given the lack of staff to open every day and serve visitors, galleries in Burgos, Soria or Palencia have now designed a new tool that allows tourists to see it whenever they want. This network of 80 unique spaces It is open 365 days a year.

They open with a code, as if it were the entrance to a holiday apartment, which is received once the reservation is made to visit it. With that key the gallery is opened and the electrical and computer systems are also turned on.

It is a way of keeping museums alive that would otherwise be doomed to disappear. “It is impossible for a Town Hall of a town with less than forty inhabitants to be able to afford to attend to this museum on a daily basis,” says Miguel Ángel Fernández, the project’s technical manager.living museums‘.

There are not enough human resources or a constant flow of visitors for museums like the one in the comicin solarana (Burgos), where barely 70 residents live. “We have Captain Thunder, Thumb, collections of old photographs of the town…”, explains the mayoress, Ginebra Angulo.

The project started four years ago and there are already some 80 museums between Castilla y León, Galicia and even the Czech Republic. So far this year, more than 12,000 tourists have visited them. In addition, all museums are equipped with security systems that allow them to be perfectly monitored and not suffer any deterioration.