The Pompidou Centre in Malaga
The Travel Pages visits the Pompidou Centre in Malaga, the Andalusian outpost of the main centre in Paris, in the ‘City of Museums’.
The Pompidou Centre in Malaga was definitely high on the list of places to see when we visited the ‘City of Museums’. We’d been to Paris a year earlier and were disappointed to find that the main Pompidou Centre had just closed for major refurbishments. It closed on 22 September, 2025, and won’t open again until 2030.
However, The Pompidou Centre in Malaga has long-running exhibitions based around art works from the Paris centre, as well as putting on its own exhibitions.
Where is The Pompidou Centre in Malaga?
Map (c) Google Maps Google Map
The Center is on the waterfront by the harbour and the cruise terminal. If you’re visiting Malaga on a cruise (and it is a popular cruise destination), then the Center is an easy walk around the harbour. And you can’t miss it!
Visiting The Pompidou Centre in Malaga
You can’t miss the Center because it’s a very striking cube made up of squares of glass, some clear and some in primary colours. On a sunny day it’s quite a dazzling sight. We thought that it didn’t look very big, though, so could there be much inside it?
The answer is that there’s a lot inside it, as the cube is just the entrance area, with the rest of the Center down below ground and covering quite a large space. You wonder how on earth they managed to build it, so close to the water and with a major road nearby.
Entering the Centre
The ticket offices and shop are on what you might call the ground floor – and what a shop it is! We usually scoot through the obligatory museum shop when we leave a place, but not this time. There was an excellent book collection, a really good range of Picasso items (as you would expect in Malaga), postcards, prints, and art-related souvenirs ranging from the surreal to the really stylish.
You can get an audio tour of the main exhibition, though we weren’t offered one when we entered and only went back to get one when we saw other people using them.
Below Ground
One level down from the entrance is where the temporary exhibitions are located. On our visit there was a moving and informative photographic exhibition about man’s relationships with animals, and especially how badly we treat them. There were portraits of individual animals, done formally as in a studio, and showing them in all their dignity – as opposed to the sometimes undignified behaviour of mankind towards them.
Google Translate
The information panels for the exhibition were only available in Spanish, and well beyond our limited abilities to translate. Here was a chance to try the Google Translate app that I’d downloaded to my phone in case it was useful on this visit. Oh boy! Take a photo of the information panel and it’s translated into impeccable English within a few seconds. You can even email it to yourself if you want to keep it for reference.
Further Below Ground
Going down another floor you come to the huge space where you’ll find a themed exhibition based around works from the Paris collection. On our visit this was ‘To Open Eyes: Artists’ Gaze’, which runs until 31 January 2027, having opened in July 2025. These long-running exhibitions are marvellous, as it’s always disappointing to read a review of an exhibition that grabs your interest only to find that it closes in a month’s time.
To Open Eyes
The current exhibition is on rather a vague theme, which could encompass almost anything an artist does, but here’s what the Centre itself says about it:
The meaning of art is to “learn to see and feel life”, said Josef Albers, a German-born artist and teacher who lived in the USA, in 1940. Echoing this statement, the new semi-permanent exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Málaga focusses on the way in which artists invite us to decentre our gaze and thus transform our relationship with art, society and the world.
As with a lot of modern art, some works were striking and thought-provoking while others seemed pretentious – especially the video installations. There’s nothing more boring in the world of modern art than videos which show the same clip over and over again, or which show someone doing a mundane everyday act in slow motion.
But as a picture is worth a thousand words, here are a few thousand words’ worth of pictures, to show some highlights from the exhibition – or at least what we thought were the highlights.
Whatever is on display at the time, a visit to the Pompidou Centre in Malaga should definitely be on your short list of the best things to do in Malaga.
More About The Pompidou Centre in Malaga
To find out what’s on, visit the official website.
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