A study of the visiting public analyses the profile of the individual visitors to 16 museums in the city on the basis of 32,000 surveys.

Once again this year, the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona has presented the results of the survey which it has been conducting on the visitors to the city’s museums for the last five years. The general profile of the individual visitors to the museums is given below:

PLACE OF ORIGIN:

• 70% of the visitors to the museums of Barcelona live abroad, mainly in European countries, while 17.7% are residents of the city of Barcelona.

LOYALTY:

• 78% of the visitors went to the respective museum for the first time (except in the case of CCCB, which has a more local public, with a rate of 57% repeat visitors).
• Among the residents of Barcelona, the percentage of people visiting the respective museum centres for the first time dropped to 47%.

INFORMATION SOURCES:

• Since foreign residents form a large majority among visitors, tourist information sources continue to be the main endorser of museums (43%).
• The other information sources mentioned are personal recommendations (15%), Internet (13%) and the media (8%).

Further information and the results of each of the museums participating in the survey are available at Survey 2016 results report.

Barcelona’s network of civic centres is consolidating a joint system of indicators to further the knowledge of the activity carried out at these facilities.

The civic centres of the city began to be coordinated by the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB) in 2012 and, among other lines of work which were implemented, the design of a joint system of indicators for the set of centres was started up.

During a period of over two years, a working group formed by district experts, the directors of some of the centres, and culture experts from ICUB defined, pooled and validated this system of indicators with the stakeholders involved.

The work carried out in that period has provided a historical series of data (2014-2016) that allow a deeper analysis and interpretation of the civic centres’ activity.

Today we can determine how many courses or workshops are held each year, how many people attend them, what activities are carried out there, in which ones the participants can be counted and in which ones they cannot, what use the entities make of their available spaces, etc.

Thanks to the participation and interest of all parties involved in the project, we now have a wide-ranging set of data on the civic centres, reflecting a reality which has been marked up to now by very little visibility from the standpoint of cultural indicators.

We invite you to visit the Civic centres 2016 activity report or to download the data on the aforementioned three-year period in the respective section of this website.

Under the leadership of the festival’s new director, Cesc Casadesús, the Grec 2017 Festival of Barcelona is making its appearance.

Grec 2017 is structured along two main programming lines:

• Grec Montjuïc hosts a large part of the most international aspect of the festival on Montjuïc hill.
• Grec Ciutat highlights local creativity with companies and productions of authors based in Barcelona.

The festival also includes a programme of parallel activities featuring different stakeholders of the city and especially the network of Art Factories and the libraries of Barcelona.

If you would like to see the figures on the Grec Festival of Barcelona, visit:

• Grec 2017 programme in numbers 
• Grec 2016 report

Information on the balance of Grec 2017 is available in this note.

On the night of Saturday, 20th May, 87 museum centres of Barcelona and its metropolitan area were visited by 176,364 people.

The participation of centres based outside Barcelona has been growing year by year and the 15 centres of this type which took part in the initiative in 2017 accounted for 10% of the total visitors.

You can also find the participation data from previous years at this link.

The Night of the Museums is an initiative promoted by the Council of Europe which arose in 2005 and which now comprises over 4,000 museums. Since 2008, the Institut de Cultura has coordinated the activity in Barcelona and promotes a joint communication campaign for the city and its metropolitan area.

2017 SURVEY

In this edition of the Night of the Museums, the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona has conducted a face-to-face survey of visitors to learn about various aspects of the public who take part in this initiative. It has considered the following topics, among others:

• Is the public of the Night of the Museums loyal to this activity?
• Does participation in this initiative arouse an interest in repeating the visit or in visiting other museums during the rest of the year?
• Is the profile of the public of the Night of the Museums the same as that of the people who visit the museum centres during the rest of the year?

The analysis of the results of the survey will become available in the month of September.

Related news: What is the public attending the Night of the Museums like?

According to the data of the Òmnibus municipal survey, 92% of the city’s people have taken part in some cultural activity in Barcelona in the six months leading up to the survey.

The percentages of people listed below report that they have taken part in some cultural activity of the respective categories:

• Cinema: 70%
• City festival: 70%
• Museum or exhibition: 58%
• Library: 54%
• Concert: 52%
• Theatre: 43%
• Civic centre: 40%
• Conference: 35%
• Cultural festival: 31%
• Dance: 11%
• Opera: 11%

On the average, the city’s people as a whole have participated in 4.7 cultural proposals, although a big difference exists between the attendance figures for young people aged 16 to 24 years (average 6 activities) and the figures for senior citizens (3.6).

By districts, the lower participation of the residents of Ciutat Vella and Nou Barris (average 4.3 and 4.2, respectively) stands out.

PROFILE OF PARTICIPATING PERSONS

Young people aged between 16 and 24 years lead the figures of attendance at city festivals, cinema, libraries, concerts and cultural festivals.

Territorially, the fact stands out that the residents of the districts Nou Barris and Ciutat Vella are among those who have taken part in almost all the cultural activities the least (with the exception of city festivals, in which the residents of Nou Barris participated in above-average numbers). The attendance of the residents of the rest of the city’s districts depends to a large degree on the activity involved. For example, the people living in the Eixample district have attended museums, conferences and cinemas in greater numbers, with scant attendance at civic centres and city festivals, while the residents of the Sant Martí district show practically the highest figures of attendance at civic centres and cultural festivals and above-average attendance at museums and theatre productions, while attending concerts, libraries and cinemas in scant numbers.

More data are available in the complete report on the survey at:

2016 Òmnibus municipal survey. Culture report

The performing arts offering in Barcelona continued to follow the downward trend that began in 2011 but the number of spectators grew a timid 2% over 2015.

In recent years the performing arts field in Barcelona has been progressively reducing its offering of productions, performances and seats, while its spectator figures have slowly begun to recover. With respect to 2014, for example, in 2016 there was a loss of 624 performances (over 425,000 seats) while, on the other hand, ticket sales have increased by 15,536.

In the face of these data, a number of questions arise such as: was there an excess in the offering in past years? Should the offering be reduced even more, devoting greater efforts to policies addressed to drawing new spectators? Or, on the contrary, should a larger and more diversified offering be promoted with a view to drawing to the theatre the population sectors who do not feel attracted by the present offering? Does the city of Barcelona have a ceiling of performing arts spectators?

These questions obviously do not have one sole answer and they should be approached from beyond the analysis of the available data.

Yet even so, the data always challenge us to interpret them.

Would you like to take a try at it?

Performing arts data 2009-2016