Displaying items by tag: tourism

From October, Tutankhamun’s golden mask will be off display and his tomb closed to tourists. The boy king’s famous mask is being taken off display at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, to enable conservators to remove epoxy resin, applied to the mask in August 2014 as a way of re-securing its loose beard. Although the beard was not broken, as was widely reported at the time, and the epoxy has not discolored or harmed the mask, it is not the most suitable material for the job, and too much was applied, leaving dried traces visible to viewers.

Buoyed by strong international tourism, a spate of well-attended shows and a seven-day-a-week schedule, the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 6.3 million visitors in the last year, the most since it began tracking these statistics more than 40 years ago.

The Met, which announced the figures late Monday, said it was the fourth year in a row that the museum had drawn more than 6 million visitors, keeping it in a rarefied group that includes the National Gallery and the British Museum in London, which both attracted slightly larger numbers, and the Louvre, the world’s biggest draw with more than 9 million in each of the last three years.

On one side is the Prado, a renowned repository of art and a showcase of Spanish culture that draws huge numbers of tourists. On the other is a brash newcomer, emerging onto the scene in layers of gray granite from a hillside near the baroque royal palace of Spanish kings.

In advance of its opening, the upstart, the Museum of Royal Collections, is insisting that the Prado surrender four paintings, including its top two attractions — “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch and a sumptuous 15th-century depiction of the descent of Christ from the cross by Rogier van der Weyden.

When Mike Sorge thinks about the new expansion at the Corning Museum of Glass, he isn't thinking about glass.

Sorge, who owns Sorge's Italian Restaurant on Market Street in Corning, is more excited about the extra customers the new wing is expected to bring to his business and others.

The museum plans to unveil the highly-anticipated 100,000-square-foot North Wing on Friday, and local business owners and tourism officials are preparing for an increase in tourism spending when visitors come to Corning. Last year, more than 400,000 visitors came to the museum.

Iruña to the Basques—the historical capital of the old Kingdom of Navarre in northern Spain, has hitherto been known mainly for its annual Festival of San Fermín, with its running-of-the-bulls immortalised by Ernest Hemingway in “The Sun Also Rises”, and as a stop on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Now the small city is seeking a different form of cultural validation, by taking a path well-trodden in Spain: the opening of a snazzy new museum.

The Museo Universidad de Navarra, tucked into a hillside outside the city center, is most obviously inspired by nearby Bilbao, where the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim has been breathing life into post-industrial torpor since 1997.

Egypt plans to reopen the royal tomb of Nefertari, a wife of Ramesses II (who reigned from 1279BC to 1213BC), on a regular basis after it was closed for eight years because of concerns over the condition of the site’s wall paintings.

The burial site in the Valley of the Queens was opened for ten days in mid-October to celebrate the 110th anniversary of its discovery by the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli. Speaking at an event in London last month, Egypt’s minister of tourism, Hisham Zazou, proposed that the site remains open.

The Guggenheim museum will remain in Bilbao for the foreseeable future. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced yesterday that it was renewing the agreement is has with the Basque museum until 2034. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has welcomed almost 17 million visitors and staged over 140 exhibitions since it opened in 1997; and has had much success over the 17 years that is has engaged with the public. In fact the museum success quickly triggered the redevelopment of the formerly decrepit port area of Bilbao and bolstered tourism in the entire Basque Country.

The regeneration of the area and the economic evolution of the country was coined the “Guggenheim effect" soon after to describe this museum-led process.

An exhibition featuring artifacts discovered off the coast of Egypt is set to tour Europe. “Egypt’s Sunken Secrets” is organized by Franck Goddio, the founder of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology, in association with Egypt’s Ministry of State for Antiquities. Artifacts have been selected from museums across the country, including 18 from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, while over 200 come from recent underwater explorations by Goddio’s team.

In a press release, Mamdouh el-Damaty, Egypt’ s head of antiquities, said that the exhibition will strengthen cultural ties between Egypt and the EU, encourage tourism to Egypt, and bring in €600,000 of funding for the ministry, as well as an additional €1 per ticket after the 100,000th visitor.

A string of blockbuster shows at  London’s world-renowned museums helped to attract record numbers of tourists to the capital in the first half of this year, according to figures released today.

Tate Modern’s "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" exhibition pushed  the number of visits to the gallery to almost 700,000 in the first six months of 2014 — up from 425,000 for the same period last year.

Official figures released today put the capital on course for its most successful tourism year. International tourists made 8.459 million trips to London between January and July, a 7.6 per cent increase on 2013.

When “60 Minutes” did a flattering piece last year on this old West Texas cow town turned hip cultural mecca, it was following a path already taken by Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the New York Times.

Marveling at oddities like the “Food Shark” and “El Cosmico,” and noting the harmony among cowboys and artists, reporter Morley Safer pronounced Marfa “a capital of quirkiness.” In closing, he bid a “fond farewell to the magic kingdom of Marfa.”

But while few doubt that the arts and tourism have rescued Marfa from decline, some see a price to be paid for being the darling getaway spot for well-heeled visitors from Houston, New York and California.