Despite coronavirus restrictions limiting the celebrations, the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga commemorated on Wednesday the tenth anniversary of its opening to the public. During the proceedings, which were carried out with the appropriate social distancing and usage of masks, the museum was hailed by managing director Javier Ferrer as an "economic, cultural and social hub" in the city.

Over the past decade, he revealed that the museum has welcomed 1.5 million visitors, has held works from 350 museums across the world and has loaned out forty of its own pieces for national and international exhibitions. The museum is now keen to renew the loan agreement it has to display these works with their owner, Baroness Carmen Thyssen.

In a recent interview, Baroness Thyssen announced that negotiations had begun to renew the loan. The initial agreement, signed in 2011, lasts for another five years and grants the museum temporary possession of some of Thyssen’s collection free of charge. It originally applied to 230 works of art, although now the figure is around 300. Although the baroness did not elaborate on what the new agreement might look like, Malaga’s mayor Francisco de la Torre expressed his hope that it would allow the museum to keep “as many as possible” of its works.

The mayor also stated that he was waiting for Baroness Thyssen to come to a formal agreement with the Spanish government over the future of her collection in the country before continuing talks on the renewal of the loan in Malaga. Indeed, Baroness Thyssen is expected to come to a fifteen-year agreement with the government to keep her 400 international artworks in Spain at a cost of €6.5 million a year.

On Wednesday, her nephew Guillermo Cervera, patron of the Malaga museum, took part in the anniversary celebrations and thanked the gallery’s staff and the local government for their role in developing it into a cultural institution. He also praised how the museum has been able to promote economic, social and urban change, for example through the renovation of the Villalón palace where the gallery is located.