1. Introduction

The aim of this article is to broadly describe the main impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on the museums of Catalonia. Its data mainly refers to the 115 registered museums that existed in 2020. In some cases, data relating to other heritage facilities in Catalonia are cited, whether collections, monuments or interpretation centers.

On 14 March 2020, the Spanish government declared a state of emergency, locking all citizens down to their homes and limiting mobility only to essential activities. This circumstance implied shutting down museums, as well as all other cultural facilities—libraries, theaters, cinemas, auditoriums, and so on.

The Museums Service and Movable Property Protection addressed a survey(1) to the management teams of museums to assess the magnitude of the situation.

More than 97% of museums stated that their visitor support and educational services suffered from this measures. In the same section of audience management, only 38% of museums declared that their closure affected communication tasks, which indicates the centers’ determination and interest to maintaining contact with their closest audiences, either via web or email. However, tasks linked to the management of collections (conservation, documentation, restoration) suffered lower rates of impact (between 55 and 67%) than those linked to the management of audiences.

General services were the least affected ones, although they presented still pretty high rates regarding maintenance and cleaning (68-70%). In relation to security, a basic element given that one of its roles is the protection of cultural heritage, reports indicate that “although not all museums rely on private security companies, those that do not only kept them, but in some cases even increased their services.”

Additionally, a little more than a third of museums declared that they had problems in the management of human resources and finances. The fact that only 19% expressed affectations in IT services is a clear indicator that the digital world became the main field of action, both for internal tasks and for the production of an online offer to replace in-person exhibitions and attractions. Thus, 78% of the registered museums declared to have started to carry out their operations in a digital environment. From that initial moment—not even a month had passed since the beginning of lockdown—this report notes that “a positive point is that some museums (33%) are using telework to disseminate content from different actions of their own.”

On April 28, the gradual de-escalation of the extreme restrictions implemented until June began, and after three months of closure, most museums began to reopen their doors.

On 3 July 2020, the Catalan Ministry of Culture approved the resumption plans for the cultural sector,(2) which established action guidelines to recover activity in a pandemic context.

The state of emergency ceased to be effective on 21 June 2020. From that moment on, Catalonia regained control over the restrictions, which varied according to the consecutive waves of the pandemic. The pace of mobility depended on the periods of municipal and regional lockdown, which in turn depended on the pandemic’s territorial indicators.

This evolution meant that the recovery of activity at museums was erratic and unpredictable. The different waves of covid-19 kept the sector on its toes. On 30 October 2020, a resolution came into effect which dictated the perimetrical lockdown of Catalonia and the limitation of mobility for people between different municipal areas on weekends, as well as the greatest limitation of mobility during weekdays. On 14 December 2020, another resolution was made effective, this time dictating the limitation of the entry and exit of people from different regions on weekends. During Christmas, mobility to family residences was allowed. On 7 January 2021, a resolution dictating the limitation of the entry and exit of people from different municipalities came into force.

These circumstances contributed to a much slower recovery of visits to museums and heritage facilities than initially anticipated.

It should be noted that some museums, most large collections linked to the Gaudí heritage and other privately owned facilities did not reopen simultaneously after lockdown. While most public museums reopened after lockdown in June 2020, large privately owned facilities delayed their return. In most cases, they were forced to put their workforce through a temporary employment regulation file (ERTO). The fact of needing extensive staff teams to attend an audience mostly made out of tourists (who were returning little by little) meant that putting the machinery into operation again entailed high costs. In some cases, facilities such as the Sagrada Família, the Pedrera or even the Miró Foundation reopened only on weekends at the beginning, and it was not until the summer of 2021 that they reopened to full hours.

In the following section, some data are presented about the impacts on teams and income, with a special focus on the impacts on attendance, including some references to the digital response by museums at the end.

2. Impact on teams

One of the main consequences of the lockdown caused by the pandemic were the changes in work habits, which changed from face-to-face work to teleworking. The Museums Service survey mentioned above indicates that 94% of museums put their teams to work remotely. In 46% of the cases, minimum face-to-face tasks were established.

The shutdown had serious consequences for workers in some museums, who suffered ERTOs and, on occasion, dismissals. These consequences affected to a greater extent the staff of private, large museums and heritage facilities. Thus, the Miró Foundation, the Toy Museum of Catalonia, the Chocolate Museum, the Antoni Tàpies Foundation, the Dalí Theatre-Museum, and the Pau Casals Museum declared that they had made an ERTE, either to their entire staff or to part of the team, while the rest worked remotely.

Regarding the staff of outsourced service companies (public care, educational services, cleaning, and so on), these are professionals who were already quite precarious before the pandemic, and in many cases ended up losing their jobs. According to the survey carried out by the Museums Service,(3) 71% of museums had temporarily suspended the commission or concession of some of their services provided by external companies. Educational and dissemination services were the most affected: three museums had external staff with ERTOs and seventeen with temporary suspension.

It is necessary to review the case of the municipal museums of Barcelona that kept the contracts of outsourced companies. Indeed, the Mayor's Decree, of 23 March 2020, established additional measures and criteria in the contracting of the municipal public sector on the occasion of the economic and social impact due to the health crisis situation caused by the covid-19, ordering the maintenance of all contracts signed with service companies, which allowed the maintenance of the working conditions of their employees.

3. Impacts on income

From the point of view of income, two types of museums must be differentiated, according to the market in which they develop their activity. On the one hand, museums that work in the competitive market, highly relying on tourism and with high prices; on the other hand, those who operate in a market under the paradigm of public services, with public prices and staffed with civil workers.

The first group of museums is made up of private museums but also some large public museums, while the second group is made up of publicly owned museums. The museums in the first group are the ones that suffered the greatest impact on their incomes due to the disappearance of their tourist audience during many months following the pandemic. These are privately owned museums and large public museums. It should be noted that, out of the 115 registered museums, 99 (86.1%) are publicly owned and only 16 are privately owned.

It is paradoxical that public museums that worked the most on strategies to diversify their audiences and their sources of income with the aim of minimizing dependence on public funds are the ones that suffered the most from the drop in their own income. Their forced closure pushed them to make drastic reductions, compared to other public museums dependent on the titular public administration, which did not suffer these reductions because they continued to cover all costs.

These circumstances generated two debates in relation to the funding of museums. The first debate addressed to what extent public administrations had to cover the deficits of museums generated by the reduction of their own income, a consequence of the drop in attendance.

The second debate arose as a result of the need to stimulate visits of a local audience—some museums asked for free admission as a strategy to attract this public. Among some museum directors, the underlying desire to bet on free museums is not new. This is the case of the director of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), who right before the reopening of the museum in June 2020 claimed to redefine the funding of museums and proposed free access to museums, considering them public services comparable to hospitals, libraries and schools.(4)

 

4. Effects on attendance

The pandemic raised uncertainty to previously unknown levels. At the beginning, some voices expressed that it would be a short-term crisis. Thus, the first reports on the impact drawn up by the Observatory of Audiences of Cultural Heritage of Catalonia issued forecasts based on the hypothesis of a slow recovery already at the end of 2020.(5)

In this first report, prepared during full lockdown, the number of visitors that the registered museums of Catalonia would receive in 2020 was estimated, as well as the loss of visitors during the months of closure and the decrease of tourist audiences in the months following the reopening.

Three scenarios were presented based on three possible museum reopening dates: 1 June, 1 July and 1 August. The most optimistic scenario (reopening on 1 June) estimated that the registered museums of Catalonia would receive around five million visitors in 2020, a loss of 51% of those received in 2019. At the other extreme, the most pessimistic scenario estimated that the total number of visitors that museums would receive in 2020 reopening on 1 August would be 3.3 million, which would translate into a loss of 67.7% of those received in 2019.

In the end, however, the effects of the pandemic on the attendance to museums and heritage facilities were more profound than those estimated in the forecasts. Back then, the vast majority of us did not imagine that we would still have to endure two long years of restrictions.

As this chart shows, registered museums went from almost 10,452,744 visitors in 2019 to 2,422,367 in 2020, a loss of more than 76%. It should be noted that this decline was even more pronounced in the case of collections (79%).

In the territories where tourism had the most relevance, the impacts were even greater. Barcelona (−79.1%) was the territory with the largest decrease in audiences in 2020 compared to 2019, while the least affected territories were Lleida and Aran (−58.5%), Penedès and Central Catalonia (−61.7%).

The museums that used to receive the most visitors were the ones that experienced the biggest decline in visitors during 2020 compared to 2019. This is another effect of the decline in tourism, which is percentage-wise bigger as the volume of visitors increases.

The audience data for the year 2021 allows us to observe a certain recovery in attendance. Thus, it is estimated that the museums of Catalonia received 4,321,399 visitors in 2021. This represents an increase of more than 78% compared to 2020. However, the visitors received during 2021 are still 59% less than in 2019.

It should be noted that in 2021 the pandemic still experienced periods of high incidence, which restricted the mobility of citizens. 2022 is the first year without any restrictions and with the incidence of the pandemic under control, thanks to the mass vaccination of the population.

In order to adapt to the new conditions after lockdown, museums worked hard to offer health security to visitors (limitation of capacity, defined routes, mandatory use of the mask, and so on), and adjusted management to the new context with reservations and by selling tickets online.

All audience segments experienced a decline in 2020.

4.1. Tourism v. local population

The pandemic had an impact on foreign tourism. Early lockdowns and the subsequent restrictions on mobility dramatically reduced tourism, both international and domestic.

The 2020 survey of museums of Barcelona(6) shows how the drop in attendance was much bigger in those museums that traditionally relied on tourists, such as the Picasso Museum or the Miró Foundation, compared to facilities that are most visited by the local public, like the CCCB or the Museum of Natural Sciences.

It should be noted that while foreign tourism decreased, there was an upswing in domestic tourism. Once the period of lockdown had passed, people showed a strong need to get out of their homes and enjoy nearby destinations and the outdoors. These outings were adapted to the requirements of mobility restrictions,

and this circumstance meant that, paradoxically, some facilities increased attendance in August 2020, with figures that exceeded those of the same month in 2019. The Observatory of Audiences of Cultural Heritage of Catalonia analyzed the cases of twelve museums and other heritage facilities in this situation.(7) All the analyzed museums agreed that this increase in attendance was due to the rise of local audiences and visitors from the rest of Catalonia, who were mainly looking for activities outside, very participatory and close to their homes (outdoor activities that combined nature and culture, guided tours, theatrical tours, temporary exhibitions on topics very close to visitors and their everyday life).

With regard to the local public, museums carried out actions and alliances with local agents, and considered their presence and participation in local dynamics very important to gain visibility in their environment.

In general, an increase of a local audience was observed in the frequentation of museums. The ICUB's 2020 annual survey(8) found that, although the number of total visitors to museums in Barcelona fell by more than 70% in 2020 compared to 2019, in the particular case of local visitors, this reduction only reached 25%. Thus, 79% of the people who visited Barcelona's municipal museums in 2020 came from Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia. This percentage peaked only up to 25% before the pandemic. The data from 2021(9) confirm the beginning of the recovery. Tourists gradually began to come back, a fact that can be seen in the frequency of visits to Barcelona's museums: visitors from Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia decreased to 47.2%, while visitors from Spain and the rest of the world they rose to more than 48%.

Everything indicates that this recovery in tourism that began in 2021 will continue in 2022, a year with tourism forecasts that could reach pre-pandemic levels. According to data from Turisme de Barcelona,(10) 78.1% of tourists who visited Barcelona in May 2022 declared that they made cultural visits. Therefore, it can be deduced that this recovery will have a strong impact on museum attendance.

4.2. Groups

The attendance of school groups dropped in greater proportion than other segments in 2020 due to the pandemic.

In 2020, school visitors to Catalonia's heritage facilities fell by 74.5% compared to 2019, going from 2,161,291 to 550,597.(11) Museums with a higher number of visitors experienced a higher decline in school audiences. Registered museums are the facilities that suffered the smallest drop in their audiences (73.2%), while, in contrast, collections suffered a greater decline (-91.6%).

In 2021, schoolchildren began visiting museums again, mainly those in their immediate surroundings, to minimize the risk that public transport could entail. The progressive normalization of the situation in schools makes it possible to foresee a normalization in terms of carrying out activities outside their centers and, therefore, an increase in visits to museums.

Another segment of visitors that fell due to the pandemic was that of senior citizens. This is a risk group in relation to covid-19, and, for this reason, they suppressed social outings and contacts for a long time. And this had an impact on museum visits. According to some museum directors consulted in mid-2021, back then this group was still to be seen again in museums.

4.3. Underlying phenomena

The pandemic had an obvious impact on the cultural practices of citizens, including visits to museums and other heritage facilities. However, it also had an impact on the motivations to visit such places.

In this sense, studies have been carried out at an international level that analyze the implications of the pandemic in relation to people's cultural behavior. This is the case of the special edition of "Culture Track, Culture+Community in a time of crisis"(12) on the impact of the covid-19 crisis on the cultural practices of Americans, or the study prepared by The Audience Agency “Between Lockdowns: Attendance by Audience Spectrum Types & Attendance by Distance,”(13) which analyzes behavioral models and their evolution during the different periods of lockdown.

In Catalonia, the 2020 “Survey of Cultural Practices in Catalonia. Museums and Other Heritage Facilities” indicates that 35% of Catalans over the age of 14 declared to have visited exhibitions, museums, monuments or art galleries during 2020, 18.4 points less than in 2019 (53.4 %). This is a very considerable drop after several years in which the museum visitation rate had shown a sustained upward trend. It is also observed that, in addition to the decrease in the proportion of people who declare visiting museums, there is also a strong drop in the total number of visits. Probably due to the fear of leaving home because of covid-19, the demographic group over 55 yo are the group that was most affected by the pandemic, with a relative loss of almost four out of ten visitors compared to 2019. Moreover, the pandemic had a different impact depending on the level of education of the population, this being the main socio-demographic factor that discriminates the interest in visiting museums. The group whose propensity to visit museums and other heritage facilities in 2020 fell the most compared to 2019 are those who belong to the two categories that presented the lowest levels of visits: people without an education and people with a first degree education visited exhibition centers more than half less. On the other hand, among people with higher levels of education—third-degree education—who have greater propensity to visit museums, the relative drop does not reach a third.

In Spain, the Permanent Laboratory of Museum Audiences prepared a study to analyze the changes that occurred in the habit of visiting museums, with a special emphasis on the motivations that led citizens to resume—or not—their cultural practices prior to the pandemic, based on the population's knowledge and degree of involvement with museums, supporting them to resettle in the new post-pandemic scenario.(14) This survey was carried out in December 2020, that is to say, six months after the lifting of the lockdown and shortly before the start of vaccination.

The comparative analysis of people who regularly visited museums before the pandemic and those who did so after the lockdown allowed us to identify four different profiles:

—Visiting again: Slightly less than half of those who regularly visited museums before the pandemic visited a museum or an exhibition in the six months following the lockdown (10.3%).

—Stopped visiting: A little more than half of those who regularly visited museums before the pandemic did not visit a museum or exhibition again after lockdown (12.3%).

—New visitor: one in eight people who did not visit museums regularly before the pandemic visited a museum or an exhibition after lockdown (12.2%).

—Still not visiting: almost two-thirds of those interviewed who had not visited museums before the pandemic continued without visiting them after lockdown (65.3%).

This research highlights that new visitors to museums after lockdown visited a museum or an exhibition as an alternative plan given the difficulty of traveling around in the same conditions as before the pandemic, and they are now carrying out some of the same activities they used to do when traveling. It should be noted that among those who declared that they did not visit museums regularly, there was a high proportion of people who stated that they visited museums only when they were travelling. Therefore, among this group there has been a process of replacing international destinations with destinations in the Spanish territory, despite maintaining the same range of activities that they carried out on international trips prior to the pandemic.

The activity of visiting museums, as well as any other cultural practices that people used to do before the pandemic, both in terms of type and intensity, was mainly affected by changes in the mood of the population due to the situation generated by covid-19.

Research has made it possible to visualize that fear has been the main factor that induced behavioral changes.

Thus, people experienced the impact of the pandemic differently, with some people being more afraid of social interaction than others. In short, those people who had more fear of social interaction took more precautions and reduced their cultural and leisure activities in the outside after lockdown. On the other hand, other people had a lower perception of risk in social interaction and a greater need to leave their house after the long period of home lockdown. Hence, based on the personal antecedents of each person in relation to their cultural practices before the pandemic, both in terms of type and intensity, the feeling of fear turned out to be the main variable that separated different behaviors of the population in relation to visiting museums. The combination of perceived fear and the practice of visiting museums before the pandemic in each person formed differentiated groups according to their behavior after lockdown.

5. The digital response

5.1. Increase in supply

The vast majority of Catalan museums already had some virtual offer before the pandemic, both in terms of resources (digitized collections, documentation, etc.) and activities (virtual visits, virtual exhibitions, etc.).

But even so, museums reacted quickly, devoting efforts and resources to significantly increase their digital offer. In most cases, their new offer consisted of the digital reproduction of an already existing physical offer.

Museums focused many of their efforts on creating a digital educational offer, providing resources to a school audience, which had in turn also become a virtual audience.

According to a study by the Observatory of Audiences of Cultural Heritage of Catalonia,(15) 32.5% of heritage facilities in Catalonia created new digital educational offers, with an average of 2.7 activities per facility. Almost 30% of facilities adapted their existing face-to-face teaching offer to a digital format, with an average of 3.1 activities per equipment.

Registered museums were the most active type of heritage facilities in adapting the educational offer, far more than collections and monuments. Likewise, public facilities have been more active than private ones in the creation of new digital educational offers, 36.9% compared to 20%.

5.2. The response of the demand

The pandemic caused that, in an initial situation of lockdown and during the long months of limitations in mobility, virtual audience replaced part of the face-to-face audience. The issue of the interest in measuring the repercussion that the digital offer had on the virtual audience was raised. To give an answer to this question, the Observatory of Audiences of Cultural Heritage prepared a study between February and April 2020 to evaluate the public response to the digital cultural production of the heritage facilities of Catalonia during the period of lockdown and closure of facilities due to the pandemic.(16) The audience’s response was evaluated from two points of view: on the one hand, the level of visits to the websites of museums and heritage facilities, and, on the other hand, the type of content consulted on said websites.

In order to evaluate the volume of visits to these websites, an analysis of website traffic was carried out during the three weeks prior to the shutdown and the six weeks following the start of the closure period.

Research made it possible to verify that the number of users, sessions and viewed pages during the six weeks after the start of lockdown remained still without major variations, and always below the magnitudes prior to the closure. It should be noted that during the weeks when museums were closed, a very significant part of the queries usually made on their websites for information about aspects of accessibility (timetables, fees, how to get there, etc.) was no longer made.

Therefore, although the indicators of users, sessions and page views indicated slightly lower magnitudes than before closure, it can be deduced that there was an increase in traffic to consult content of a deeper nature.

After the closure of museums, a slight increase in the percentage of new users was observed, possibly related to the efforts made by these institutions to run campaigns to attract new users, viralizing their content on social networks. Both this and the slight drop in total users compared to the levels before the start of lockdown indicated that a recurrence in visits was not achieved and a good portion of new users did not become loyal.

Considering that in the weeks after closure websites sought to replace face-to-face experiences by providing online content, the moderate increase recorded in pages per session indicated a certain success during the first three weeks after the beginning of lockdown. However, during the following three weeks this indicator returned to pre-lockdown levels.

It can therefore be concluded that the new digital offer did not have the impact that could be expected among the public at a time when they did not have access to their in-person museographic offer. It must be taken into account that competition on screens was enormous at that time.

A second study(17) analyzed the type of pages visited: visits to access pages were drastically reduced, while visits to content pages increased. Content pages are those aimed at the presentation of written, photographic, audiovisual or reference material, while those aimed at encouraging in-person visits are not considered content pages.

During the first two weeks of lockdown, the content page query doubled compared to previous weeks, and it continued to grow until the fifth and sixth weeks, when it began to decline.

During the first two weeks, a strong increase in traffic was observed from educational/family themed pages, as well as media and magazines, which denotes the effort invested in communication campaigns made in these media.

Finally, it should be noted that according to the Survey of Cultural Practices in Catalonia for 2020,(18) 7.2% of the population of Catalonia over the age of 14 declared that they had seen an activity during confinement recorded or programmed especially for the occasion by museums, art galleries or exhibition halls.

Notes