Voces del Prado

Summing up 50 years

Francisco Martín Ortiz, Administrative Technician (copies), 1966-2015

The Prado Museum has naturally evolved an awful lot. Nowadays all the temporary exhibitions, thanks to the enlargement, can be done without having to move around any of the paintings from the regular collections (the permanent exhibitions). Back in the day, whenever we had a temporary exhibition, we had to vacate a hall to set everything up. Today we have a great advantage in that respect. The place we're standing right now didn't exist in those days. And we now have an information office, which we didn't have then. And the press office too, we have departments today that didn't exist in the past. We have a nice, big library. The Casón del Buen Retiro is where the library is located; in the old days the library consisted of two rooms filled with books, the way you can have them at home, along those lines. That has evolved a lot, as well as the fact that everything is noted down in a register, now everything is digitized, scanned … The Museum has truly gone forth in huge strides.
It's hard for me to have to leave, to retire, because I've been here at the Prado for fifty years and it's my second home. I've commented it on occasions, I've spent so many hours here, nearly more hours than at my home. I remember there were times we stayed until the Museum closed. Closing time was 7 p.m. and we didn't stay on longer because we were at the Villanueva building and when they closed it we couldn't stay inside, we had to leave. But we weren't in a hurry to leave and in those days we were not paid anything for staying overtime. We would stay on because we had something we had to finish and we didn't mind staying. When they came around checking everything we would leave, but we were very much dedicated to the Museum. I'll always say that it was a privilege to work here at the Prado Museum.