Clúster

Almost half of the tourists who come to Galicia visit museums and monuments.

The latest visitor figures for the museums managed by the Xunta provide a new source of optimism for the world of culture and tourism. In the first four months of the year, a total of 103,000 people passed through facilities such as the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (Santiago de Compostela), the Museum of the Sea of Galicia (Vigo) or the Provincial Archaeological Museum of Ourense, which is 15% more than during the same period of 2021 and allows recovering the numbers of affluence registered in 2019, before the covid pandemic.

These figures, made public by the Regional Minister of Culture, Education, Vocational Training and Universities, Román Rodríguez, at the Museum of Sacred Art of San Paio de Antealtares, in Santiago de Compostela, on the occasion of the celebration of International Museum Day, is endorsed by the data of other institutions, such as the Museum of Pontevedra, of provincial ownership, which during the first quarter of this year received 16,000 visitors, which is the best figure of the last seven years. In addition, this same institution in Pontevedra received more than 4,300 visits during Easter Week, the second best result in six years.

The improvement in the figures is also significant from a tourism point of view, since according to data from the Galicia Destination Tourism Survey, visits to museums and monuments are one of the main activities carried out by visitors to Galicia. This is what more than 46 of the visitors say. Only visits to places of tourist interest (75 %) and gastronomic tourism (49.9 %) surpass museums and monuments in a ranking in which even the enjoyment of beaches and the coast is below (39.5 %).

It should be remembered that Galicia has more than 80 museums and collections that can be visited, of different types (archaeology, art, house museums, science, ethnography…), officially registered in the Census of Museums and Collections. Their offer is also complemented by the offer made available to visitors by dozens of other centres scattered throughout the community and also aimed at the conservation and dissemination of tangible and intangible heritage.