Voces del Prado

Fernando Checa. Successes and failures

Miguel Zugaza Miranda, Museum Director, 2002-2017

I’m proud to say that I think I showed my predecessor Fernando Checa the things he did badly and the thing he did well.
Among the good things that Fernando did was establish the Museum’s academic and scientific quality, bringing in a new generation of curators and creating what we now call the Study Centre of the Museo del Prado, which we are all so proud of. So in that sense the Museum’s intellectual capacity is largely due to what Fernando did.
What he did really badly was communicate what he was doing. You know, the team I’m most proud of at the Museum is its Communication team led by Elena Garrido. There she was, fending off all the press attacks during Checa’s difficult time, just before I joined the Museum as director. And with a ridiculously small team of people, as it was a very small group, she initiated a radical change of direction in the Museum’s communications strategy. We started to talk about not what the press wanted to hear but the numerous things that the Museum wanted to tell Spanish society and Spanish people. That shift in communication strategy was important. I think it’s been an enormously dedicated team which has been able to take the Museum into a new and fantastic place with regard to communication.