Lisbon, Nov. 20, 2024 (Lusa) - The president of Museus e Monumentos de Portugal (Portuguese Museums and Monuments Authority) is concerned that several public-company facilities in Lisbon will be closed for renovations in 2025, coinciding with a heritage-focused tourist campaign.
At a hearing of the Lisbon Municipal Assembly as part of the ‘Less Visited City’ report, the president of Museus e Monumentos de Portugal (MMP), Alexandre Pais, realised that in 2025, in addition to the already closed Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, Museu Nacional do Traje and Museu Nacional da Música (due to open in Mafra next year), the Museu Nacional do Teatro e da Dança, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga and the Museu Nacional do Azulejo will also be closed, at least for part of the year, for rehabilitation work under the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP).
In this context, Alexandre Pais stressed that the fact that Turismo de Portugal intends to focus on Culture, in all its various aspects, to attract visitors from 2025 onwards, is a source of concern for the public company, and warned of the need for dialogue between partners.
‘We're very worried, even if the campaign starts next year, we're going to have a lot of facilities closed next year,’ he said, pointing out, in response to Lisbon's municipal deputies, that there is “no concerted strategy at the moment with Turismo de Portugal to deal with this issue”.
The president of MMP emphasised that ‘the outlook for the year is not very encouraging concerning the facilities [under the company's remit]’, so they are ‘trying to draw up communication strategies here that will allow us to take people to other places to try to overcome this issue’.
Faced with the option of trying to attract tourists on the cultural side, Alexandre Pais said: ‘When we already have spaces that are completely at the limit of their capacity, as is the case with the Jerónimos [Monastery], which is indeed a very worrying case, the Belém Tower and even the Azulejo, which are exceeding their capacity, we have to have an alternative here.’
Alexandre Pais, who has been in office for around six months, welcomed the invitation to take part in this discussion at the Lisbon Municipal Assembly and expressed his willingness to engage in dialogue with more partners: ‘Because the solution is not just up to 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 said that they are exploring various ideas, particularly during the winter period, to be able to implement them in full next summer. These ideas range from distributing visitors in spaces such as the Jerónimos Monastery by ‘slots’ throughout the day to the suggestion of having public transport circulate between cultural facilities that are more spread out throughout the city.
The head of the public company, a former director of the National Tile Museum, said that several museums are underutilised, from the Chiado Museum, particularly because of its location, to the National Museum of Ethnology, which could create synergies with the Terra de Miranda Museum in Miranda do Douro, even in terms of bringing visitors to the region of Trás-os-Montes.
‘We're at the stage of finding strategies,’ stressed Alexandre Pais, who emphasised the idea that there aren't too many tourists, they're just badly distributed, and that solutions need to be found to achieve this distribution when the prospect of a new airport will be to attract more than twice as many visitors to Portugal as at present.
According to figures from the public company released in August, the museums, monuments, and palaces under MMP's management since January received 5,157,360 visitors in 2023.
The 2023 statistics ‘show that the 38 national museums, monuments and palaces now managed by MMP saw an increase in visitors of around % compared to the previous year, representing around 444,000 more visits over the year’.
Among the most visited cultural facilities in 2023, the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon leads the way with 965,526 visitors, followed by the Sagres Fortress with 427,817 visitors and Guimarães Castle with 387,570.
TDI/ADB // ADB.
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