Voces del Prado

A Very Small Team

Montserrat Sabán Godoy, Management Technician, 1977-2016

I have to say, at the Museum I’ve suffered a lot of headaches, but it’s a place where I’ve had a great time, because there were very few people. We were very close, we went to have breakfast together, irrespective of whether we were curators or not; we went everywhere. When I joined the Museum, the Director was Xavier de Salas, and Alfonso Pérez Sánchez was the Assistant Director. Then the conservators were Mr. [Manuel Jorge] Aragoneses and another girl who belonged to the Official Corps of Conservators, Rosa Donoso [Guerrero]. They were both official curators, because they belonged to the Official Corps of Conservators attached to the Ministry. Matías Díaz Padrón was also there, although he hadn’t earned a permanent position yet when I arrived. And then Manuela [Mena] came, who achieved a permanent position in the end, although she didn’t have one in the beginning. But when I arrived, Manuela wasn’t working at the Museum yet.
The first office we had was located in the Villanueva Building. The first places we worked were situated near the lower Goya Entrance, where the works of Luis de Morales and other painters are now exhibited. That’s where the offices were, all lined up one after the other. At the end were the management offices, and we were in the library, where we had a large table where we sat down to work. There were a number of us, not many, together with a librarian, an elderly man called José María. And that was where we worked.