The president of Museus e Monumentos de Portugal expressed his concern on Wednesday about the fact that several facilities under the supervision of the public company in Lisbon will close for works in 2025, coinciding with a tourism campaign focused on heritage.
In a hearing at the Municipal Assembly of Lisbon, within the framework of the preparation of the “Least Visited City” report, the president of Museums and Monuments of Portugal (MMP), Alexandre Pais, reported that in 2025, in addition to the already closed National Museum of Archaeology, National Museum of Costume and National Museum of Music (which should open in Mafra next year), The National Museum of Theater and Dance, the National Museum of Ancient Art and the National Tile Museum will also remain closed, at least part of the year. for rehabilitation works within the scope of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR).
In this context, Alexandre Pais highlighted that the fact that Tourism of Portugal intends to focus on Culture, in its various aspects, to attract visitors from 2025, is a cause of concern for the public company, and warned about the need for dialogue between partners.
“We are very concerned”Although the campaign starts next year, next year we will have many facilities closed,” he stated, pointing out, in response to the municipal deputies of Lisbon, that “there is, at this moment, no strategy agreed with Tourism of Portugal to to address this problem.”
The president of MMP highlighted that “the outlook for the year is not very encouraging in terms of equipment.” [sob alçada da empresa]”, so they are “trying to draw up communication strategies here that allow people to go to other places to try to address this issue.”
Given the option of seeking to captivate tourists in the cultural aspect, Alexandre Pais said: “When we already have spaces completely at the limit of their capacity, as is the case of [Mosteiro dos] Jerónimos, which is a very worrying case, the Belém Tower and even Azulejo, which are exceeding their capacity, here we have to have an alternative.”
Alexandre Pais, in office for about six months, welcomed the invitation to participate in this debate, at the headquarters of the Lisbon Municipal Assembly, and was available to discuss with more partners: “Because the solution is not only In us, it has to be much broader and we have to have partners to be able to solve it.”
In this sense, the president of the MMP stated that several ideas are being explored, particularly in the winter period, to be able to fully implement them next summer, from the distribution of visitors, in spaces such as the Jerónimos Monastery, to slot machine throughout the day, given the suggestion of having public transport designed to circulate between cultural facilities distributed throughout the city.
The head of the public company, former director of the National Tile Museum, said that there are several museums with less use than they could have, from the Chiado Museum, especially due to its location, to the National Museum of Ethnology, which could reach to create synergies with the Museu da Terra de Miranda, in Miranda do Douro, even in the sense of being able to bring visitors to that region of Trás-os-Montes.
“We are in a phase of searching for strategies,” highlighted Alexandre Pais, who highlighted the idea that there are not too many tourists, they are poorly distributed and it is necessary to find solutions to carry out this distribution, when the prospect of a new airport will attract to more than double the number of current visitors to Portugal.
The museums, monuments and palaces, managed by the MMP since January, received 5,157,360 visitors in 2023, according to data from the public company released in August.
National museums and monuments will have more than five million visitors in 2023
The 2023 statistics “show that, in the 38 museums, monuments and national palaces now managed by the MMP, there was an increase in visitors of around 10% compared to the previous year, which represents around 444 thousand more visits throughout the year. anus”.
Among the most visited cultural facilities in 2023, the Jerónimos Monastery, in Lisbon, leads with 965,526 visitors, followed by the Sagres Fortress, with 427,817 visitors, and the Guimarães Castle, with 387,570.
Source: Observadora
