Date Published: 23/06/2020
ARCHIVED - ARQUA sub-aquatic archaeology museum in Cartagena closed for filtration repairs
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
The museum will be closed for five months
The Arqua, Spain’s national underwater archaeology museum in the port of Cartagena, is to close its doors to visitors for a further five months due to problems of seawater seeping into the building on account of deficiencies in the construction which some sources are attributing to budget cuts prior to its completion in 2008.
Closure of the museum was first scheduled for March, April and May, but planned works were postponed due to the Covid crisis. The museum re-opened briefly on the 9th June for the Day of the Region of Murcia and will now close for five months.
Repairs will cost 262,000 euros, and principally aim to avoid the formation of puddles in the exhibition halls, something which has become a regular occurrence in recent years, with the bulk of the repairs and improvements being centred on the drainage system. Thankfully, the leaks are reported not to have led to any damage being caused to the exhibits in the museum.
Following the Covid crisis staff have now started to remove exhibits which will be re-organised during the repair period.
The leaking of water into the exhibition areas is attributed to the blockage of pipes within the drainage system, and the work to be carried out will make these pipes easier to access and clear on a regular basis. Give that the Arqua is built on land reclaimed from the sea the issue of drainage is a complicated one and is of vital importance, and the effects of the pressure from the sea have become clearly visible on the lower level of the museum.
The construction of the Arqua, designed by Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra, cost around 20.3 million euros, but not long after it opened the first problems of damp on the lower floor, four metres below sea level, began to appear. It was reported in El País when the first closure was announced prior to the Covid lockdown that during construction the architect was aware of the problem and recommended the installation of a 15-centimetre-thick containing chamber around the lower floor, but the relevant government departments failed to heed the advice and instead merely surrounded it with a layer of gravel.
Among the exhibits at the Arqua are 600,000 coins from the Nuestra Señora de Las Mercedes, a Spanish ship which sank in the early 19th century and was at the centre of a long legal dispute between the Spanish government and the US treasure hunter Odyssey, and the remains of one of the oldest known vessels in the world, a Phoenician ship dating back to the 7th century BC which was found in Puerto de Mazarrón.
Official figures show that during 2019 the museum welcomed 107,407 visitors, and that the numbers have almost doubled since the treasure of the Nuestra Señora de Las Mercedes was housed there.
For this reason, during closure staff plan to incorporate all of the principal pieces recovered from the site of the “Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes” which was sunk in 1804 in the Gulf of Cádiz by the British, who were uaware of the great treasure being carried by the vessel, into the new static exhibition, replacing the smaller exhibition which shows a representative selection of the items recovered, including some of the coinage.
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