The Tamesis
The new millennium has seen museums around the world grow – and are still growing further. Institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are undergoing sweeping campus reimaginings, while the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have also undergone major expansions in the past decade. Even the Louvre in Paris, the world’s most visited museum, has proposed plans to reorganize itself.
This expansion was driven in large part not only by a desire to display more of the museum’s growing permanent collection, but also by the need to accommodate increasing numbers of visitors. However, one major agency has said this approach is no longer a priority.
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At a press conference announcing the Prado’s 2026 exhibition schedule, museum director Miguel Falomir said he was concerned that the museum was becoming “oversaturated” in terms of visitor numbers, according to a report in Museo del Prado. era London.
“The Prado no longer needs one tourist. We are satisfied with 3.5 million people,” Falomir said during the presentation. “Museums can collapse because of their success, like the Louvre, where some rooms become oversaturated. The important thing is not to collapse.”
The Prado receives 3.5 million visitors a year, making it among the 15 most visited museums. The Art Newspaper’s visitor data report for 2024, the last year for which such statistics are available. The Louvre leads the list with 8.7 million visitors in 2024, while the Met ranks fourth with 5.7 million.
Falomir noted in his speech that the Prado is much smaller than the Louvre, which has a total floor area of 2.6 million square feet and approximately 753,000 square feet of exhibition space, according to the Louvre’s website. The Prado last expanded in 2007, when the floor space increased by more than 50 percent to a total of approximately 475,000 square feet. The goal of this expansion is to increase visitor capacity.
According to the company, the main problem with the Prado is that era The report says some of its most iconic paintings are widely circulated, including those by Diego Velázquez odalisque (1656) and of Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510). Part of Falomir’s ongoing strategy is how to improve the visitor experience when viewing these works, given current physical constraints. This includes optimizing entrances, reducing group sizes and stricter enforcement of photography bans within galleries.
“It’s not like riding the subway during rush hour,” he said. “You can’t judge a museum by the number of visitors. The quality of visits is more important than the quantity.”
In 2026, the Prado Museum will host a series of exhibitions spanning centuries of art history. These include “Italian Style. Spanish and Mediterranean Gothic, 1320-1420” (opening May 26), “Prado. 21st Century” (opening June 9), “Rilke and Spanish Art” (opening November 17), a survey of the German Renaissance painter Hans Baldung Grien (opening November 24) and “Marianne of Austria” (opening December 1).
