Arts + Culture

Europe’s First Underwater Museum Opens Off the Coast of Spain

Perhaps you've seen da Vinci's Mona Lisa at The Louvre, Van Gogh's The Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art, or Rembrandt's The Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum, but have you ever scuba dived through an underwater exhibit? Now's your chance.

A Brooklyn-based writer and editor, Chelsea's work has appeared in Matador Network, The Huffington Post, the TripAdvisor blog, and more. When not planning her next trip, you'll usually find her drinking way too much iced coffee (always iced—she’s from New England) or bingeing a Netflix original series.

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British artist Jason deCaires Taylor— the same man behind the Museo Subacuático de Arte in Cancún and the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park in Western Grenada— is back at it again, this time with Europe’s premier underwater museum: Museo Atlantico. Though he started submerging pieces off southern Lanzarote’s coast—in Bahía de Las Coloradas—back in 2016, the museum was officially opened to the public with an inauguration hosted by President Pedro San Gines earlier this year.

If you’ve got what it takes to dive 45 feet under—among the angel sharks, barracudas, octopus, and butterfly rays that explore the area as frequently as paying museum-goers—you’ll find 12 sculptural collections, including the Raft of Lampedusa, a haunting lifeboat piled with 13 hyperrealistic refugees, and The Rubicon, 35 figures frozen in time, walking towards a wall that the artist says "emphasizes that the notions of ownership and territories are irrelevant to the natural world" (can you say timely). Taylor’s pieces are twofold, though; more than just politically eye-opening, they’re also functioning as large scale artificial reefs, rehabilitating and regenerating the sea bed. We’re not saying you have to go and support the cause…but it is what Leonardo DiCaprio would want (and isn’t that what we all want?).

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