Chloe Glover (Reporter)
EXPECTED visitor numbers to Malaga’s Pompidou Centre have been massively overestimated.
According to the city’s Culture Councillor, Gemma del Corral, data suggests 28% fewer people will have visited the landmark attraction by the end of this year than initially hoped for.
The city now expects only 180,000 to visit, 70,000 less than the 250,000 touted for the year by officials ahead of its opening in March 2015.
Numbers for Malaga’s Russian Art Museum, also opened in 2015, were similarly down on predictions.
A total of 95,000 people is expected to visit by the end of the year, instead of the 150,000 forecast.
Corral said that the disappointing figures mean the centres have missed out on a possible €944,000 in revenue.
The most fascinating thing in the Russian Museum are not the paintings, but the indescribable atmosphere of barely hidden surveillance by the Russian KGB which you will feel just after entering this very white and cool building (cool in the sense of a fridge). When you switch from one exhibition-hall to the other you notice in your back the piercing gaze of the middle-aged, mouse-grey men and women who are carefully watching that nobody comes too close to the paintings (a selection of paintings from the Eremitage in St. Petersburg) and that you always carry your ticket with you.
Perhaps the Málaga officials should advertise on this strange aspect “feel as you were a soviet apparatchik in Málaga” of Museo Ruso and not on the dull fact that this is only another ordinary museum inside Málaga.