Lisbon, Nov. 20, 2024 (Lusa) - The president of Museums and Monuments of Portugal (MMP) on Wednesday defended the promotion of spaces in World Heritage sites, such as Mafra, which will host the Music Museum, to relieve tourist pressure on some of Lisbon's monuments.
Alexandre Pais also said that initiatives are needed to make visitors aware of other less visited areas and monuments in the capital during a hearing at the Lisbon Municipal Assembly, which is listening to various organisations in the sector to draw up the "Less Visited City" report, to recommend that Lisbon City Council "define and implement a strategy for dispersing tourist flows".
The president of the MMP, who took office around six months ago, acknowledged that he still doesn't have a "very clear" strategy for resolving "the very high pressure" on spaces such as the Jerónimos Monastery, Belém Tower and the Coach and Tile Museums, but said that among the solutions will be ways of taking tourists out of Lisbon, with the promotion of spaces in World Heritage sites such as Mafra, since "Sintra has already reached its capacity limit".
"The Music Museum is also going to leave the Lisbon orbit, it's going to Mafra, it's going to open next year, and so it's also an idea to promote Mafra - a World Heritage Site, but as a space linked to music," he said.
He emphasised that this idea of extending the perimeter of tourist attractions could also involve other venues in World Heritage sites, such as Évora and "possibly Alcobaça", which are an hour or an hour and a half from Lisbon, which "is acceptable for most" foreign visitors.
"We have the capacity for more tourists, but there is a poor distribution," he emphasised.
He stressed that having an airport in the centre of the country would be important "because that would take a lot of tourists away from the areas that are currently most overloaded and could attract a lot of tourists", namely to Fátima, Tomar, or Batalha, for example.
According to Alexandre Pais, a fortnight ago, Turismo de Portugal presented a strategy for promoting Portugal over the next five years based on culture, heritage and gastronomy.
"When we already have spaces completely at capacity, such as the Jerónimos [Monastery], which is indeed a very worrying case, the Belém Tower and even the Tile Museum, which are exceeding their capacity, we have to have an alternative here," he explained.
He also defended the deconcentration of tourism in Lisbon, citing the creation of routes for observing tiles due to the interest shown by visitors to the Tile Museum.
To promote interest in spaces that don't have many visitors, such as the Chiado Museum, he pointed to the need to create synergies with other contemporary art museums "that exist in the city and outside the city".
In the case of the National Museum of Ethnology, another museum that is "undervalued", he suggested creating common strategies between this museum and the Terra de Miranda Museum in Miranda do Douro "to create a potential here for those who have more time to spend in Portugal to visit that region".
"There isn't just one solution. We have to find several strategies to solve it. [...] We're trying to use this winter as a period of reflection and contacts to see if we can do something next summer," he added.
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