Museums in the Netherlands head for a record year, thanks in part to rainy summer
After three low-attendance coronavirus years, museums in the Netherlands can slowly breathe a sigh of relief again, and that's partly thanks to the rainy summer weather that has spread across the Netherlands. That's because, according to Trouw, museums could look forward to higher visitor numbers this year, almost reaching pre-pandemic levels.
Wim van de Water, management assistant at the Museum of the 20th Century in Hoorn, is also excited about the upswing in the cultural sector, noting that more people are now venturing into museums since the coronavirus pandemic. "People were still cautious," Van de Water says. "They had to wait a while until all the restrictions were lifted. I'm seeing that they're just now starting to spend money again for a nice day out," he told the newspaper.
The best example of this is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which, like many other Dutch museums, had to close its doors to the public in early 2022 due to the coronavirus measures, now has almost as many visitors this year as it did before the pandemic. The success is also partly due to the popular exhibition about the painter Johannes Vermeer, which could be visited in the spring of 2023. With over 650,000 visitors, Vermeer was the best-visited exhibition in the history of the Rijksmuseum. The exhibitions were so sought after that people scrambled for tickets on various online trading platforms.
According to the Museums Association, 2023 could become the peak year ever for Dutch museums. So far, the record has been 32.6 million visits for the 438 museums that belong to the museum association in 2019, with 9.2 million visitors using the museum card this year alone. The summer months of June and July 2023 were particularly busy among card users. Around 110,000 visitors with a museum card went to the museum, far more than four years ago. In total, the Museum Association could count over 300,000 card visitors for this year, Trouw reports.
