Visual arts and literary cultural tourism in Northern Spain

The good burghers of Pamplona along with many other Spanish cities have looked on in astonishment at the cultural revival of the northern city of Bilbao since the opening of the Guggenheim Gallery there nearly 20 years ago.

Cultural tourism is a significant part of Spain’s tourist economy with various parts of the country continually improving.

Pamplona had its running of the bulls made famous by Ernest Hemingway’s account in The Sun Also Rises. The event, conducted each year during the feast of St Fermin, attracts huge crowds of domestic and international tourists. But it lasts only a few days and possibly doesn’t help the city’s image of being a cultural destination.

The city has always had its Museum of Navarre with works of art from prehistory through to the present century and its current exhibition “The 21st century in 3D (through till February 17th) takes an innovative look at recent contemporary developments.

The gallery has never been a major cultural destination. Yet over the past few years, there has been a cultural change with several new contemporary galleries making Pamplona an important arts hub in Northern Spain. The most notable addition has been The Museo Universidad de Navarra which was opened last year by King Felipe VI.

The museum, located at the edge of Pamplona city on the grounds of the university, is also adjacent to the pilgrim’s walk of the Camino de Santiago, which passes through Pamplona and the university grounds. The building is designed by Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker prize-winning architect and native of the Navarre province who also designed the new extension to the Prado museum in Madrid.

While the exterior of the building will never be as iconic as the Frank Gehry building, the interior spaces are much more with dramatic and extensive. The Bilbao gallery has access to the Guggenheim collection. The Pamplona gallery has a large collection of works by Rothko, Tàpies, Picasso and Kandinsky, including works from the private collection of a local heiress and daughter of a local construction magnate, María Josefa Huarte Beaumont.

As well as works from the Huarte collection, the gallery is able to draw on the university’s collection of 10,000 photographs and 100,000 negatives of works by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others.

One of the opening exhibitions – “The World Turned Upside Down: The Calotype in Spain" – displays 160 negative and positive images taken using William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention capturing 19th-century Spain, and its archetypes, through the eyes of travelling photographers on a type of “Grand Tour”.

The current exhibitions build on the gallery’s strengths in photography including the huge show De Laboris, by the French photographer Pierre Gonnord, which features huge portraits of coal miners and a series of portraits of Spain’s last coal miners with images taken at seven pits in Asturias and Castilla y León. He also showed a series of portraits featuring Portuguese Alentejo gypsies, depicting them in the style of the Old Master paintings such as Murillo.

Along with supporting the University gallery, the Huarte family have also built a contemporary art space in the village of Huarte, 3 miles (4.8 km) from Pamplona. The building was designed by architects Franc Fernández de Eduardo, Carles Puig and Xavier Vancells. It is a large 6,500-square-metre black cube with three floors. The exterior is covered by a metallic mesh providing an area for outdoor activities.

The centre aims to support and encourage new contemporary artists in various disciplines related to modern artistic techniques. As well as exhibitions of paintings, sculpture and digital arts audiovisual it also places emphasis on dance and theatre.

Further out in the hills overlooking Pamplona, another remarkable gallery, The Musee Oteiza, features the work of Spanish sculptor Jorge Oteiza, one of Spain’s foremost 20th century sculptors. The museum contains a representative selection of his work consisting of 1,650 sculptures, 2,000 pieces from his experimental laboratory and numerous sketches and collages.

The building, a large cube of reddish-coloured concrete, is the work of one of Mr Oteiza's friends and collaborators, the Navarrese architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza. It is crowned by three enormous prismatic skylights. On the inside, there is a remarkable series of different geometric spaces as though one was walking through a vast version of the artist's sculptures.

The gallery is also connected by a glazed gallery to the artist’s original home and workshop. An unlikely cultural tour has been a result of the huge interest in the Dolores Redondo series of crime novels – The Baztan Trilogy – set in Pamplona and in the some of the sleepy little villages (Elizondo and Arizkum) which the female detective Amaia Salazar visits and where most of the horrific crimes and encounters with supernatural forces occur.

Locals take domestic and international visitors on tours of the villages, the streets, restaurants, bridges, churches, public buildings and the river – even the incongruous modern police station in Elizondo. The interest in the area had already been sparked by the 2013 film “Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi” (The Witches pf Zugarramurdi ) directed by, Álex de la Iglesia and set in the village of Arizkum. It drew on the tradition of witches covens said to exist in the village for hundreds of years.

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson on Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.

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