The Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA), Mexico’s most visited museum, was honoured on Wednesday (4 June) with the celebrated 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Harmony. Nonetheless, the celebration was overshadowed by a disaster: the museum had been closed to the general public the day earlier than resulting from a scarcity of safety personnel. After deliberations that reached even Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, the museum reopened to the general public on Thursday (5 June).
The difficulty started on Tuesday (3 June) when, with out prior discover, the MNA abruptly closed its doorways early, permitting solely a handful of holiday makers to enter earlier than the administration realised there weren’t sufficient guards to make sure the protection of its priceless archaeological and ethnographic collections—or of the general public. Upset and pissed off, locals and worldwide vacationers alike had been compelled to depart.
Following the award announcement, the museum and its neighborhood had been unable to have fun, because the MNA remained closed “till additional discover”. The information escalated to President Sheinbaum, who acknowledged throughout a press convention that she had not been knowledgeable of the closure of the MNA and different museums overseen by the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past (INAH).
The rationale for the closures was a transition in safety providers. Fairly than persevering with to depend on police, INAH had contracted new personal safety companies. Nonetheless, the corporate assigned to the museums in Mexico Metropolis—Sistemas Prácticos en Seguridad Privada SA de CV—failed to supply the required variety of guards. Different affected museums included the Nationwide Museum of Historical past at Chapultepec Fortress, the Nationwide Museum of Interventions, the El Carmen Museum, the Museo del Caracol and the Museo Nacional de las Culturas.
Upset guests turned away from the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico Metropolis earlier this week Photograph: Ismael Rosas
By Thursday morning, all INAH museums in Mexico Metropolis had reopened, following information that the federal government had reversed course: police had been reinstated to protect the museums.
“There was an issue with the timing of the contract INAH awarded for the guards. That’s why the museums had been closed,” Sheinbaum defined throughout a press convention on Thursday. “However we spoke with Diego [Prieto, director of INAH], and the museums reopened instantly.”
The Princess of Asturias Award jury recognised the MNA as “the inheritor to a long-standing custom of preserving an important a part of humanity’s anthropological heritage, whereas embodying the hallmarks of an excellent nation and serving as a logo of id deeply related to its individuals”.
As essentially the most visited museum in Latin America final yr, the MNA welcomed a record-breaking 3.7 million guests in 2024, surpassing its earlier excessive of three million in 2019 and marking a powerful restoration from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Positioned within the coronary heart of Chapultepec, Mexico Metropolis’s largest park, the museum was designed by the famend architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. It homes 22 everlasting galleries that includes greater than 7,000 archaeological artefacts and over 5,000 ethnological items, with the long-lasting Aztec solar stone as its most celebrated treasure.
