December 6, 2024 17:19 PM

Museo Atlantico: Europe' First-Ever Underwater Museum Opens Today!

Museo Atlantico has been inaugurated. It is Europe's first underwater sculpture museum featuring over 300 life-sized figures across 12 fittings positioned at 39 feet on the seabed.

It took artist Jason deCaires Taylor almost three years to complete and perfect the Lanzarote attraction in Museo Atlantico. The underwater museum is sprawling with statues of massive sizes located off the coast of Bahia de Las Coloradas. The sculptures are made of pH neutral materials and are designed to survive for hundreds of years as an artificial reef for marine life to grow well on, says, DailyMail. This underwater museum has been fashioned to create consciousness of the marine ecology issues and the urgent need for environmental conservation.

The new setup includes 35 figures walking in the direction of a gateway in a 30-metre-long, 100-tonne barrier. The work is called Crossing the Rubicon. According to The Guardian, the work targets to mark 2017 as a focal moment, a line in the sand and an aide-mémoire that our world's oceans and climate are shifting and we need to make a crucial action before it is too late.

The project is the biggest scale installation by British sculptor deCaires Taylor. His first underwater sculpture park in Grenada, the West Indies, was regarded as one of the Top 25 Wonders of the World by the National Geographic magazine. Building the underwater artworks was a massive task, involving a team of scuba divers. Models for the life casts involved local residents and visitors. Museo Atlántico is the newest underwater work by deCaires Taylor. His other works include The Museo Subácuatico, in Cancun in Mexico, which involves over 500 life-size sculptures. There are also other works located in the Bahamas in the Caribbean, the river Stour in Canterbury, Kent, and the Thames at Vauxhall, London.


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