Mexico’s hottest museum reopens after lack of safety guards precipitated it to shutter

The Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA), Mexico’s most visited museum, was honoured on Wednesday (4 June) with the distinguished 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for Harmony. Nevertheless, the celebration was overshadowed by a disaster: the museum had been closed to the general public the day earlier than resulting from a scarcity of safety personnel. After deliberations that reached even Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, the museum reopened to the general public on Thursday (5 June).

The difficulty started on Tuesday (3 June) when, with out prior discover, the MNA abruptly closed its doorways early, permitting solely a handful of tourists to enter earlier than the administration realised there weren’t sufficient guards to make sure the security of its priceless archaeological and ethnographic collections—or of the general public. Disenchanted and pissed off, locals and worldwide vacationers alike have been compelled to go away.

Following the award announcement, the museum and its group have been unable to have fun, because the MNA remained closed “till additional discover”. The information escalated to President Sheinbaum, who acknowledged throughout a press convention that she had not been knowledgeable of the closure of the MNA and different museums overseen by the Nationwide Institute of Anthropology and Historical past (INAH).

The rationale for the closures was a transition in safety companies. Fairly than persevering with to depend on police, INAH had contracted new personal safety corporations. Nevertheless, the corporate assigned to the museums in Mexico Metropolis—Sistemas Prácticos en Seguridad Privada SA de CV—failed to offer the required variety of guards. Different affected museums included the Nationwide Museum of Historical past at Chapultepec Citadel, the Nationwide Museum of Interventions, the El Carmen Museum, the Museo del Caracol and the Museo Nacional de las Culturas.

By Thursday morning, all INAH museums in Mexico Metropolis had reopened, following information that the federal government had reversed course: police had been reinstated to protect the museums.

“There was an issue with the timing of the contract INAH awarded for the guards. That’s why the museums have been closed,” Sheinbaum defined throughout a press convention on Thursday. “However we spoke with Diego [Prieto, director of INAH], and the museums reopened instantly.”

The Princess of Asturias Award jury recognised the MNA as “the inheritor to a long-standing custom of preserving a necessary a part of humanity’s anthropological heritage, whereas embodying the hallmarks of an awesome nation and serving as a logo of identification deeply related to its individuals”.

As probably the most visited museum in Latin America final yr, the MNA welcomed a record-breaking 3.7 million guests in 2024, surpassing its earlier excessive of three million in 2019 and marking a robust restoration from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Situated within the coronary heart of Chapultepec, Mexico Metropolis’s largest park, the museum was designed by the famend architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. It homes 22 everlasting galleries that includes greater than 7,000 archaeological artefacts and over 5,000 ethnological items, with the enduring Aztec solar stone as its most celebrated treasure.