The Prado starts 2026 with measures to prevent crowds from turning it into the “rush hour metro”

The National Prado Museum starts its programming for 2026 with the ‘Host project’, which, according to what its director, Miguel Falomir, announced this Wednesday, will consist of a series of measures to prevent the art gallery from becoming the “subway at rush hour.”

Thus, he assured that although the more than 3.5 million visitors who came to the museum in 2025 are good news, the Prado “does not need more” and that the intention is to diversify the profile of attendees. ““We don’t want going to the Prado to be like taking the subway at rush hour,” Falomir added.

These measures, which will be formally announced later, will “optimize” the resources of the art gallery and will persevere with measures that already exist such as the prohibition of taking photographs and new ones will be implemented such as optimizing access to the Museum or resizing the number of people who make up the visiting groups. “They are measures not only to prevent (the Museum) from collapsing, but also to ensure that it is a pleasant experience,” said the director.

As for the 2026 exhibition program, the exhibitions will not be monographic of “big names” in art, but there will be specific themes.

‘In the manner of Italy, Spain and Mediterranean Gothic’ will be the first major exhibition of the year, dedicated to show an “unpublished” topic not only in museum and museographic terms but also in terms of “artistic literature.”

In Falomir’s opinion, it is one of the “most complex and ambitious” exhibitions that he remembers in his professional career at the helm of the museum. Thus, the role of Italy in the development of painting in Spain during the 14th and 15th centuries will be shown. The director has assured that it has been very “complex” to do logistically because the pieces They are “very delicate” textiles and works on boards that have often not left the spaces in which they have always been.. One of them comes from a cloistered convent that has not left it since the 14th century.

Framed in the year of ‘Three queens’ in which the Museum claims the role played in its history by Isabel de Farnese, Christina of Sweden and Philip IV’s own wife, the art gallery will host the exhibition ‘Mariana of Austria’.

Although she was not a collector queen, she was an “absolutely capital figure” in Spain, according to Falomir. “She was probably the queen who used art most conscientiously to promote her different roles.“, he added and then announced that this exhibition will have works by important artists such as Diego Velázquez or Claudio Coello with loans from museums in Vienna.

Another of the temporary exhibitions in 2026 will be ‘Rilke and Spanish art’, which will hit theaters on the centenary of the artist’s death. Also in the line of action that deals with the Prado itself, you can visit ‘Prado. XXI Century’, in which will reflect on how the art gallery must “reinvent” itself and not “rest on its laurels” to continue maintaining the “cultural leadership it has until now.”

Furthermore, next winter it will be inaugurated ‘Hans Baldung Grien’ about the figure of the German Renaissance painter; and on photography the Prado presents the samples ‘The Multiplied Prado. Photography as shared memory’ and ‘The universe of the artist before the camera’.

Completing the programming, Falomir has announced that the rest of the samples will be ‘Valeriano D. Bécquer. The pictures of customs’, ‘Ricardo de Madrazo. Drawings and watercolors’, ‘The picture of hunger’ -in which the story of this painting will be told, which went from being one of the most valued in the Prado to “little more than a joke”-, and its own itineraries such as ‘Engineering in the Prado. A bridge between art and technique’.

The director of the art gallery has assured that although This year there will be no “big names” like last yearthe Prado does not depend on its temporary exhibitions to generate income because most of its visitors come to the rooms through the Permanent Collection, which takes “pressure” off of the temporary ones. “We may be right or wrong (in the temporary ones) but there is no such urgency. We are privileged”has settled.