Belgium also reopens museums from tomorrow. Distance 1.5 meters, one-way paths, no mask requirement

Even in Belgium, one of the countries hardest hit by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic (the incidence, to date, is 4,744 cases per million inhabitants, making it proportionately the sixth hardest hit country in Europe, after San Marino, Luxembourg, Iceland, Ireland, and Spain), museums will reopen from tomorrow, Monday, May 18. As in Italy, the reopening in Belgium will be gradual and under the banner of medical and health prescriptions.

Visitors are required to follow the physical clearance (set at five feet), but theuse of face masks is not mandatory: museums, however, will prescribe that they be used if traveling by public transportation. Museums will also set up restricted access not only to the institutes themselves, but also to the halls (which will not be able to accommodate more than a certain number of people depending on size) and certain rooms (for example, toilets, which will have regulated access), and will have to dispense with food services. There will also be mandatory one-way routes between rooms.

Some museums have already put all the necessary measures in place and are ready to reopen: this is the case, for example, with the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where the rules are stringent: access by time slots, compulsory route “in the form of a walk through the museum” (so they say from the institute), spacing, restricted access to the halls, ban on the use of elevators for all those without reduced mobility problems, payment by card only (at the moment Belgian museums are the only ones that do not just discourage cash: they have banned them outright), security checks, access prevented to visitors who will be going to the museum with bulky backpacks or trolleys (backpacks or handbags will be allowed instead). All guided tours and group tours are also canceled, nor will audio guides be available. Same measures in many other museums.

Instead, let’s see which major institutions are reopening to the public. The Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts open on May 18, and the same date for the M Museum in Leuven, the Musée Bruxellois de l’Industrie et du Travail, the African Museum in Namur, the Grand Curtius in Liège, the Anderlecht Museum in Brussels, the Walloon Life Museum in Liège, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tournai, for the Cathedral of St. Bavon in Ghent where Jan van Eyck’s Polyptych of the Mystic Lamb can be admired. On Tuesday, May 19, it will be the turn of some important museums such as the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent (but no the major Jan van Eyck exhibition, one of the world’s top events of this ill-fated 2020, has been extended), the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, the Keramis in La Louvière, the Glass Museum in Charleroi, the Musée Felicien Rops in Namur, and the Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels. On May 20, doors open at the Museé Magritte in Brussels, while there will be a wait until May 21 for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi and May 26 for the Aquarium in Liège.

Pictured: photo of a room at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp.

Belgium also reopens museums from tomorrow. Distance 1.5 meters, one-way paths, no mask requirement

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