The City of Barcelona is celebrating a marked increase in the number of visitors to Barcelona’s museums and municipal exhibition centers during 2023, with figures that exceed pre-pandemic records.
According to provisional data compiled by the Technical Office of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, nearly four and a half million people have explored the various artistic and cultural proposals offered by the City of Barcelona.
This remarkable increase of around one million visitors compared to the previous year reflects the resilience and recovery of the cultural sector after the restrictions imposed by the health crisis.
The total figure of 4.4 million visitors is close to those recorded in 2019, when the influx exceeded 4.8 million people, marking more than double the number recorded in the challenging year 2021, at the height of the global health crisis.
Museums in Barcelona: the most outstanding and the most visited exhibits
On the cusp of the most frequented museums is the Picasso Museum, which welcomed more than one million visitors, surpassing the one million mark for the first time since 2019.
Two outstanding exhibitions, dedicated to the artist Carmen Calvo and to the connection between Miró and Picasso, attracted an enthusiastic public.
The Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria follows closely behind the Picasso Museum, with 888,800 visitors, consolidating itself as a popular cultural destination in the city.
Meanwhile, the Museu d’Història de Barcelona MUHBA, with 860,000 visitors, distributed in several venues, remains a historical reference of the metropolis.
The exhibition dedicated to the artist Carmen Calvo at the Picasso Museum, which featured works created during the pandemic, was one of the most visited of the year, attracting 350,800 people.
Likewise, the “Miró-Picasso” exhibition at the same institution has accumulated more than 200,000 visitors to date, and this figure is expected to increase.
Other notable exhibitions include “Memòries de la Pandèmia. Només ens en sortirem juntes” at Castell de Montjuïc, which attracted 190,000 visitors, and the exhibition on Daniel Henry Kahnweiler at the Picasso Museum, which attracted 84,939 visitors.
In addition, “La resta” at the Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria, with 49,629 visitors, and “Digital Impact” at the Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHUB), with 40,891 people, were also very popular.
Success in exhibition centers
In addition to museums, municipal exhibition centers experienced a significant increase in visitors during 2023. La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, with 126,000 visitors, and La Capella, with 73,600 visitors, led the list of the most frequented.
In particular, the exhibitions “John Berger. Permanent Red” and “Leeds Animation Workshop” at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge attracted 56,217 and 39,688 visitors, respectively.
This year, the exhibition centers saw an increase of 30,000 people compared to the previous year.
