The new millennium has seen museums around the world grow—and then grow some more. Institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are in the midst of sweeping campus reimaginings, while the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston have unveiled major expansions over the past decade. Even the Louvre in Paris, the world’s most visited museum, has floated plans to reconfigure itself.
Much of this expansion has been driven not only by the desire to display more of museums’ ever-growing permanent collections, but also by the need to accommodate rising visitor numbers. One major institution, however, has signaled that this approach is no longer a priority.
At a press conference to unveil the Museo del Prado’s 2026 exhibition schedule, the museum’s director, Miguel Falomir, said that when it came to its visitor figures, he feared the museum was becoming “over-saturated,” according to a report in the Times of London .
“The Prado does not need a single visitor more. We are comfortable with 3.5 million,” Falomir said during the presentation. “A museum can collapse due to success, like the Louvre, with some rooms becoming over-saturated. The important thing is not to collapse.”
With 3.5 million visitors annually, the Prado breaks the top 15 most-visited museums, according to the Art Newspaper’s 2024 visitor figures report, the last year for which such statistics is available. The Louvre tops the list with 8.7 million visitors in 2024, while the Met comes in at number four with 5.7 million.
During the presentation, Falomir noted that the Prado is significantly smaller than the Louvre, which has a total floor space of 2.6 million square feet and around 753,000 square feet of exhibition space, according to its website. The Prado was last expanded in 2007, when it increased its footprint by more than 50 percent, bringing its total square footage to around 475,000 square feet. The goal of that expansion was to increase its visitor capacity.
The main concern for the Prado, according to the Times report, is the circulation around of some of its most iconic paintings, including Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510). Part of Falomir’s ongoing strategy is how to improve the visitor experience, given its current physical constraints, when seeing these works. That includes optimizing its entrances, reducing group sizes, and more strictly enforcing bans on photography in the galleries.
“It can’t be like taking the tube at rush hour,” he said. “You can’t judge a museum by the number of visitors. The quality of the visit is more important than the quantity.”
In 2026, the Prado will mount a number of exhibitions, spanning centuries of art history. These include “In the Italian Manner. Spain and the Mediterranean Gothic, 1320-1420” (opening May 26), “Prado. 21st Century” (opening June 9), “Rilke and Spanish Art” (opening November 17), a survey of German Renaissance painter Hans Baldung Grien (opening November 24), and “Mariana of Austria” (opening December 1).
