City of museums: Málaga bets on culture to draw tourists and talent

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/27/malaga-museums-tourists-arts-culture-spain

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Boasting views of the Mediterranean and surrounded by lush gardens, Málaga’s five-star Hotel Miramar was once a place to see and be seen for Spanish royalty and bourgeoisie.

Now, 90 years after it was inaugurated by King Alfonso XIII, it sits empty. Construction workers mill about the site meticulously working to restore the hotel to its former glory so that it may one day reopen.

For Málaga’s mayor, Francisco de la Torre, the rebirth of Hotel Miramar is a sign that his €100m gamble on rebranding the city is paying off. During his 15 years in office he has lead an aggressive campaign to turn Málaga into a place brimming with culture. This southern city of 570,000 people now has more than 30 museums, most of them added under Torre’s watch.

“This city doesn’t have a heritage that’s as striking as the Alhambra in Granada or the Córdoba mosque or the Giralda of Seville,” he told the Guardian as he shuttled between museum openings this week. “But now we have museums.”

His campaign reached new heights this week with the opening of the first foreign outposts of two high-profile museums: the Centre Pompidou Málaga and the Málaga branch of the St Petersburg State Russian Museum.

France’s Centre Pompidou has signed a five-year agreement allowing Málaga to house a popup Pompidou, with the Spanish city paying €1m a year for the rights to use its name as well as pieces from its vast collection.

This month 100 pieces from the Pompidou’s 20th- and 21st-century collections began arriving at the Cube, a converted space on Málaga’s waterfront. Outfitted at a cost of €6.7m, this futuristic white building topped with a transparent cube is now home to works by Frida Kahlo, Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger as well as music and dance performances. The city expects 250,000 visitors a year.

The Málaga branch of the Russian museum, the subject of a 10-year agreement, opened its doors on Wednesday. Housed in an old tobacco factory refurbished for more than €500,000, its opening display is dedicated to Russian art of the 16th to 20th centuries, featuring works by Ilya Repin, Wassily Kandinsky and Vladimir Tatlin.

After touring the Russian museum on Wednesday, De la Torre said he was thrilled to see the latest phase in the city’s transformation. “It’s a feeling of great satisfaction for me,” said the fast-talking mayor. While his People’s party colleagues across the country have been accused of crippling the country’s cultural sector with tax hikes and cuts to subsidies, De la Torre has done the opposite, pouring tens of millions into turning Málaga into a big-name arts hub.

The Pompidou sits in the city’s “mile of art”, as it has been dubbed by some media, near the Picasso Museum and the Centre for Contemporary Art, both of which opened in 2003, as well as the Carmen Thyssen Museum, which features 250 pieces from Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza’s collection on loan to the city.

The city’s investment in culture isn’t just about attracting tourists, according to De la Torre, although tourism is a factor. “Years ago all the tourists would turn right as they left the airport, heading directly to the Costa del Sol. Now they’re coming to Málaga,” he said. In 10 years the number of visitors to the city has increased by 127%, to 3.5 million last year.

The mayor argued that Málaga could also use culture to attract top talent from around the world to work in fields such as technology and innovation. “To have a city like Málaga that has everything from medieval to contemporary art, it gives us a certain security that Málaga is competitive when it comes to attracting talent.”

As the city searched for its identity, culture was an obvious direction given the city’s links with Pablo Picasso, said José María Luna, who heads the public agency that oversees several of the city’s most prominent museums. “We’re tremendously lucky in that one of the icons of 20th-century painting was born in Málaga. It felt natural for culture to be the backbone of our identity.”

From this starting point, the city’s ambitions kept growing, he said. “I think there’s nothing like it anywhere else, in terms of square metre of museum per inhabitant.”

In a region where one in three people is unemployed, the mayor’s decision to pour money into culture hasn’t been without controversy. This year Málaga – a city carrying a debt of €600m – is poised to spend €4.2m on the Pompidou and €3.7m euros on the Russian museum alone.

In the past 10 years the city has spent €100m on arts and culture, say opposition councillors, who last year called an emergency council meeting to address the issue.

“They finance whatever interests them from a political point of view, without thinking about their own citizens,” said Maria Gámez, a Socialist member of the city council. Eduardo Zorilla, a United Left councillor, called the spending an “excessive waste”, arguing that the funds could be better spent on social housing or policies to create employment.

De la Torre passionately defended his decisions. “We’re not spending exaggerated quantities. And what we have spent has had exceptionally clear impact,” he said, pointing to the rise in tourists. “Along with wealth, tourists bring jobs, and that’s the best social policy, the creation of jobs. The reality is that both within and outside of Spain, other cities are looking at us with envy.”

De la Torre, who hopes to be re-elected when Málaga goes to the polls in May, said he wasn’t quite done building museums just yet. “We can always add on, there’s always room for more projects. We have to evaluate our resources, but I think its worth pushing forward,” he said. He smiled as he added: “It’s a beautiful line: Málaga, city of museums.”