The Louvre plans to evacuate its priceless treasures from Paris

One of the most famous museums in the world, the Paris Louvre plans to evacuate some of its priceless exhibits in special storage facilities that will be built next to the new branch of the museum in the industrial city of Lance in northern France.

The management of the legendary museum, with the support of the government of the country, in view of the severe floods that have occurred in Europe in recent years, fears that the basement of the Louvre, which stores unique artifacts of world significance, may someday be flooded. Thus, in the coming years, about 460,000 pieces of art included in the museum’s collections will move to the north of France.

At the current exhibition, the museum usually displays only about 35,000 exhibits, while the rest are underground, in the immediate vicinity of the banks of the Seine, France’s largest river. It is her departure from the coast that the leadership of the Louvre is afraid of.

Minister of Culture Aureli Filippetti officially announced plans to move the collections from the Paris Museum to a special repository that will be located within 200 km near the Louvre-Lance - a museum branch in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The French government has already requested a feasibility study for the project. However, the Louvre spokeswoman said that a number of issues still need to be resolved, for example, it is not yet clear whether 196,000 drawings from the museum’s collection will be transferred to remote repositories.

In 2009, former Minister of Culture Frederick Mitterrand approved a scheme for storing priceless museum exhibits in a special center in the city of Sergie Pontoise, 30 km northwest of Paris, which was to become part of the largest project of the National Heritage Center. The proposed storage location was theoretically intended to house collections of the three most important museums in Paris that are in danger of flooding: the Orsay Museum, the Branly Museum and the Louvre Museum. But the idea had to be abandoned because of the uncertainty regarding costs. Representatives of the Orsay Museum and the Branly Embankment Museum have so far declined to comment on new plans for hosting the Louvre collections.

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru