Barcelona museum open its doors to nudists

A museum in the Spanish city of Barcelona arranged an event on Saturday, October 28, that was possibly unprecedented in Spain.

Organised in collaboration with the Catalan Naturism Club, the management of the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia opened its doors to nudists.

Attendees were treated to a special 90-minute tour of the city’s cultural centre during which they were able to stroll totally naked through its hallways and galleries.

They took in different works of art in a more ‘natural’ way, which included viewing the Riace Bronzes exhibition of photographs by Luigi Spina.

The collection included two large Greek bronze statues of naked warriors dating from the 5th century BC that were discovered in 1972 near the Italian town of Riace.

Was everybody naked during the tour?

To make the tour more complete, even Edgar Maestre, the guide in charge of the group was also naked. Explaining the reasons for this striking initiative, he told elespanol.com: ‘We wanted it to be a more colourful visit and not the typical guided tour’.

‘We wanted the people who came to see it to feel exactly the same as the work they were seeing’, he continued.

The museum promoted this extravagant idea on its website using the concept: ‘We promise visitors the possibility of admiring the works posing in the same situation as them, completely naked and surrounded by other bodies’.

These type of passes, although rare in Spain, have been carried out in other parts of the world such as Paris. In the French capital, the Art Museum previously opened its doors for a nudist visit very similar to the one held in Barcelona.

How did the attendees feel while on the tour?

Marta, a 59-year-old healthcare worker who was part of the small group that was able to experience this naturist visit, explained her feelings about what was a unique opportunity.

‘I feel the same intensity as observing it with clothes, but with the difference that we can better understand that nudity has always existed and bodies should not be a source of shame for anyone’.

The message that both the Archaeology Museum and the Catalan Naturism Club wanted to convey was the normalisation of naked bodies and the acceptance of all those physiques that tend to escape the normative guidelines imposed by society.