The path leading to what was once the opulent headquarters of the Academy of Fine Arts of Cádiz is a gloomy labyrinth among construction props, deteriorated stairs going up and down, boxes, and packed furniture. It is the only safe way to reach rooms where there is no longer a trace of those crystal lamps that illuminated its centuries-old collection of sculptures, paintings, prints, and the most important artistic bibliographic compendium in the city. Everything has been packed and moved for eight years, fearing that the building housing it — the old School of Arts and future expansion area of the Provincial Museum — might collapse.
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“What we defend is returning, but what we see is something quite different,” sums up the director of the entity, photographer Pablo Juliá, surrounded by the immense 19th-century bookshelves that made up its entire library, now relocated to another safer area of the building, but also inaccessible to visitors. It was at the end of 2018 when the delicate state of the building, which has been its headquarters since the early 19th century, forced the institution to pack and dismantle all its heritage and move it to a wing without risk of collapse, where it has remained stored and inaccessible ever since.
The institution maintains its cultural activity as best it can in a headquarters ceded by the City Council since 2024. But the inability to access most of its extensive artistic and bibliographic collection amassed over 238 years of history cuts off much of the Academy’s operability. “We are forced to reject many requests from researchers because we cannot access the collections,” Juliá laments, saddened, while organizing the partial move of a limited part of the heritage to that municipal headquarters. Among the packed items are, in addition to all its vast bibliographic and documentary heritage, plaster casts of classical sculptures commissioned from Rome in the 18th century, valuable antique furniture, the paintings that decorated the ceilings of its rooms, and various works of plastic arts ranging from the 18th to the 20th century, such as the half-century of avant-garde works created in 1966 by various artists as a tribute to the poet Rafael Alberti.
All that immense heritage was displayed in the four rooms that the Academy has in the old School of Art since 1838. The institution moved to that place from the Palace of the Marquises of Recaño, its founding headquarters in 1788, when the Cádiz City Council offered to relocate there after the Mendizábal Confiscation freed part of the old Franciscan convent of Cádiz. That move was, over the years, the seed of the current Provincial Museum of Cádiz — whose fine arts collection partly comes from funds that reached the Academy during those exclaustrations. The building was allocated two-thirds to the Museum and the institution’s headquarters, and the School of Art of the city occupied the other third. It has been 36 years since that entire wing of the building has also been planned as a Museum expansion that has never been carried out.
In fact, the Academy is the last tenant remaining in that deteriorated part of the building, after the Andalusian Government moved the Conservatory and the School to a newly built property. Originally, plans were for that building, managed by the Andalusian Government but formerly municipally owned, to be rehabilitated for that new museum use shared with the Academy with investment from the Ministry of Culture, owner of the provincial museographic collection. But without a short-term intervention plan in sight, the space languishes and the cultural institution desperately contemplates the deadlock it is immersed in. “It seems interest has been lost,” Juliá complains.
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The Ministry of Culture of the Andalusian Government assures that that longed-for Museum expansion “is a matter of the political will of the Ministry of Culture,” which it urges to advance in “administratively resolving the formula to intervene in the building.” But the Ministry explains that it has just invested 735,000 euros in the works on the two roof lanterns of the building — after years of delays due to leakage problems — and that the second planned action is “the renewal of the museography of the Casa Pinillos,” a nearby building that has been waiting since its inauguration in 2012 for that investment to also function as an extension of the Provincial Museum. “Given the imminence of the elections in Andalusia, once the new government is formed, we will meet with the Ministry to resume coordination regarding the Cádiz Museum and the rest of the Ministry’s interventions in the community,” the state administration clarifies, while emphasizing the willingness to collaborate on the demands conveyed by the region.
Far from that office turmoil, Juliá and the academic and former museum director, Juan Alonso de la Sierra, lift a huge plastic sheet that acts almost like a curtain. On the other side, dozens of classical plaster sculptures await a final destination. “They were commissioned from the Spanish Embassy in Rome in the 18th century for teaching and arrived by sea. It must be taken into account that the Academy had a lot of money in a thriving and cosmopolitan city,” explains Alonso de la Sierra, art historian and author, along with his brother Lorenzo, of the best contemporary treatises on the city’s artistic heritage. One floor up, in another old classroom of the School, a huge floor covering protects the paintings that decorated the ceiling of one of its rooms, made by the 19th-century painter Alejandrina Gessler, known as Anselma.
The current period of lethargy imposed on the Academy by the worrying state of its headquarters contrasts with that dazzling past. Created in the same classicist fervor in which the San Fernando Academy of Madrid was born, Cádiz’s soon understood that being a “school of the three noble arts, architecture, painting, and sculpture,” as Alonso de la Sierra recalls, was also a form of power. Hence, at its founding, the people of Cádiz decided to recruit from Rome the main student of the painter Mengs, Domingo Álvarez Enciso, responsible for that first class of 1789 in which 400 students enrolled.
Then, in the first half of the 19th century, came Nicolás de la Cruz y Bahamonde, Count of Maule and a key patron to enrich the institution’s heritage. Also, the neoclassical architect Torcuato Benjumeda, author of some of the prominent religious and civil buildings in the province and a professor at the institution. With each new artist’s admission, “a donation of a piece,” as Alonso de la Sierra adds. And so until forming that valuable heritage that now waits, without a clear date, to be once again the subject of visits, studies, and research, now halted. Who would have told the founders of that school created to teach the noble arts that all its fruits would end up packed in dozens of moving boxes.
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