Visitors wearing protective face masks line up to see Leonardo da Vinci’s painting La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, in July 2020. The museum reopened to the public after a nearly four-month closure due to the coronavirus pandemic. File Photo by Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA-EFE
Jan. 7 (UPI) — The Louvre Museum in France has announced that it will limit the number of daily visitors to the famed institution in order to create a more enjoyable experience.
Laurence des Cars, the president-director of the Louvre, said in a statement that museum staff decided to cap daily admissions at 30,000 because of a surge of visitors.
The museum struggled for years to address over-attendance and long lines near masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa before the COVID-19 pandemic affected visiting the museum. Now, the numbers are starting to return to their pre-pandemic levels.
Around 7.8 million people visited the Louvre in 2022, an increase of more than 170% compared to 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That number is down 19% from 2019, before the pandemic began, as the first part of the year was still impacted by travel limitations.
Still, museum officials said that the change is needed “in order to facilitate a comfortable visit and ensure optimal working conditions for museum staff.”
“The extremely positive figures for 2022 are tremendously encouraging for all our staff. I hope that visitors enjoy spending time at the Musée du Louvre, particularly those discovering the museum for the first time, who represent 60% of them,” des Cars said.
“We are working ever harder to improve visiting conditions and to continue to offer a program of great quality and a unique array of live performances resonating with what’s on at the museum.”
Data provided by the Louvre shows that around 70% of all visits to the museum were made by foreign travelers in 2022, with visitors from the United States topping the list.
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Tama Kazmierczak