Voces del Prado

Always on the move

Carmen Garrido Pérez, Head of the Technical Office, 1982-2012

Actually we have had six different locations both at the Villanueva building and the Casón del Buen Retiro. The first location was tucked away under a stairwell at the Villanueva building where anybody above 1.60 or 1.70 m tall had to stoop down to enter. That was where we set up the Museum's first Technical Office.
Next they suddenly took all the equipment to the Casón, which was no longer the headquarters of the Fine Arts Administration. Assembly was always a household affair, and I had to oversee the laying of wires and setting up of bookshelves. The things I didn't do at my home I had to do here at the Museum. The Museum did not have all the staff it has today. There was a third move and the filing cabinets were lost. They emptied out the building and they were taken to the Ministry.
It was one adventure after another and in the end we ended up beneath another stairwell, again at the Villanueva building. Finally we got a decently installed location, with an X-ray bunker and all those things in the upper floors of the Murillo entrance, where the Director's Office was located many years, and from there we went to another area by the Goya entrance. Finally, following the enlargement, we were sent to the building of Jerónimos with properly conditioned facilities. We have been at six different locations, always working with the same enthusiasm and dedication. There were no frontiers. Then there was the good fortune of Mondays, when we went into the halls, setting everything up on carts because the equipment weighed a ton and that way we could work. We always said that every installation had a mobile part because there are pictures in the Museum's collections that cannot be moved around no matter how big the working area is.