Voces del Prado

The Museum in the 1970’s

Juan Manuel Gómez Agredano, Service Technician for Electricity and Air Conditioning (Electrician), 1972-What's on

Nearly all the employees were hall supervisors. In management there were three or four people and in middle management there were five people, no more. There were also a number of caretakers. And the rest were all hall supervisors. The museum opened from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon. In summer it closed at six. There wasn’t much lighting, which is why the rooms on the third floor were closed on winter afternoons, because there wasn’t enough light to visit them. The rooms had indirect light sources, light that entered via the cornices, although not all the rooms had them.
There was no air-conditioning when I joined the Museum. But there were a series of coal boilers and a coal bunker in the basements. This coal was shovelled into the two boilers so that there was heating. Nothing else. But they were inside the Museum. Later on, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, they carried out works and emptied the whole of Calle de Ruiz de Alarcón and opened it up entirely, behind the Museum, and this was where they installed the air-conditioning machines. This was how they introduced air-conditioning to the Museo del Prado in the 1980’s.
The caretakers lived in the museum 24 hours a day, although they weren’t on active service 24 hours. But they had real houses in the two pavilions located at the north end and the south end. This was where the caretakers lived. In fact, when I joined the museum, they gave coal to the caretakers, because they had coal-powered kitchens. And there was a coalman, as he was called at the time, who carried the coal to the pavilions for these kitchens.