Barcelona“Now we don’t need more tourists, we need better ones.” Under this premise, the general director of Barcelona Tourism, Mateu Hernández, presented this Thursday the plan with which the public-private consortium will continue in 2025 and which has as its most prominent element the commitment to involve the city’s museums in the search for a higher quality tourist.
This is the spirit of the Barcelona Art Season campaign, a new product with which Turisme Barcelona wants to capture visitors interested in the city’s exhibition catalogue. The idea is to promote the city’s museum offer by taking advantage of the most outstanding exhibitions and then redirecting this visitor to other museums in the city.
In this way, you want to squeeze the circulation that can have exposures like Miro-Matissefrom the Miró Foundation; Art in stonewhich can be seen in the Quarry, i Zurbarán and contemporary art, that the MNAC will open soon, to also make known other less common museums in tourism, such as the KBR Photography Centre, the Vila Casas Foundation, the Virreina or the Egyptian Museum, for example.
“We hope that Barcelona is known even more as a city of culture. That people want to come to enjoy the exhibitions that the museums offer every year,” said Hernández, who celebrated the alliance signed between Barcelona Tourism and the sector of the art and culture of Barcelona. The aim is that these visitors choose Barcelona for its cultural sector and that, once here, they also enjoy all the gastronomic, leisure, architectural and sports offers.
Presents a Arco
The model is similar in the Barcelona Obertura program, which promoted Barcelona Global to attract visitors through the offer of classical music in the city at the hands of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the Auditorium and the Palau de la Música. In another of the novelties of Barcelona Tourism’s 2025 action plan, this program will be managed by the consortium, which will expand it to take it beyond classical music and also include festivals such as Sonar, Primavera Sound and Cruïlla.
To promote these new tourist packages, beyond the advertising campaigns in the media of the visitors’ countries of origin, Hernández explained that this year Turisme de Barcelona will be present at Fitur, but also for the first time at the edition of arch “Being present at Arco is quite a declaration of intent and is the clearest example of how Turisme de Barcelona wants to be at the side of art,” said Hernández.
All of this is part of Turisme de Barcelona’s commitment to change the type of promotion of the city, but without giving up doing it. “It’s about choosing which tourists we want,” said Hernández.
The City Council welcomes the bet
The fourth deputy mayor for Economy and Tourism of the Barcelona City Council, Jordi Valls, has celebrated the involvement of the cultural world in the management of the city’s tourism, a request that the socialist councilor has made since the beginning of the mandate: “Culture is a fundamental part of any structure of citizenship that we want to create, also for tourism”.
This Thursday in the Pedrera auditorium there were, among others, the director of the Joan Miró Foundation, Marko Daniel; the director of the Catalunya La Pedrera Foundation, Marta Lacambra; the director of CaixaForum, Mireia Domingo; the director of the Barcelona Auditorium, Robert Brufau, and the artistic director of the Liceu, Víctor Garcia de Gomar.
