Tenerife, the popular Canary Island holiday spot, just got a load more pensive. The city has announced that it will soon be home to a huge new gallery dedicated to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
It’ll be an outpost of Paris’s extremely popular Musée Rodin, which attracted around 700,000 visitors per year pre-pandemic. That institution has world-famous artworks including ‘The Thinker’ and ‘The Kiss’, and will share its collection with the new museum.
The Viera y Clavijo Park, in the island capital of Santa Cruz, was previously a botanical garden with a theatre and girls’ school attached. Eventually, the site fell into disrepair, but a regeneration project hopes to re-establish it as a key artistic destination in Europe, with Rodin’s works at the centre.
It isn’t the first time the Musée Rodin has gone international. The museum has galleries in Philadelphia in the USA, and a dedicated wing at Japan’s Museum Shizuoka Prefecture. And not only will the Tenerife outpost feature Rodin’s works, when it opens in a few years’ time, it’ll also feature vast exhibition space for local artists. Something for other museums to, erm, think about?
Can’t wait for Rodin? These are the best new museums opening around the world in 2022.