Valley museums start to see visitors

BY BINU SHRESTHA

Kathmandu, Apr. 30: The museums of the Kathmandu Valley are finally seeing internal and external tourists. 

The museums, which closed intermittently for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reopened last year after daily COVID-19 infections started declining in the country. However, in the beginning, they struggled to get visitors as foreigners had not yet arrived in satisfactory numbers. That has changed though in the last two months.

The Hanumandhoka Durbar Museum, located in the UNESCO-listed World Heritage Site of Hanumandhoka Durbar Square, gets around 500 daily visitors these days, shared Sandeep Khanal, executive director of the museum’s development committee. “That number grows during public holidays,” he said.

The museum, which recently reopened the Gaddi Baithak and also has a separate gallery to display old jewels and ornaments, saw 6,331 local visitors and 410 foreigners in the mid-January to mid-February period. That number increased to 9,850 and 1,036 respectively the next month, as per the statistics provided by the Hanumandhoka Museum. Similarly, the Patan Museum, known for its golden door and window, recorded 10,386 visitors, domestic and international combined, from mid-January to mid-February. The foreigners in particular included 629 from South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries and 1,157 from other nations.

In the mid-February to mid-March period, Patan, which is the renovated royal palace of the Malla kings that once ruled the city from which it takes its name, hosted 14,817 visitors.

Over at Chhauni, the National Museum has also seen a rise in visitor numbers in last two months. 

Chief Jaya Ram Shrestha said that while the numbers had not risen to the levels they were at before the COVID-19 pandemic, they still were satisfactory. 

The museum, which is mostly visited by school students, has also been attracting parents and the general public these days, he said. 

The National Museum was visited by 2,018 schoolchildren, 859 Nepalis, 15 SAARC nationals and 72 non-SAARC tourists from mid-January to mid-February, going by the data it shared with The Rising Nepal. 

All these numbers grew the next month and reached 4,094 students, 938 Nepalis, 38 SAARC citizens and 77 non-South Asian foreigners, the data shows.

Narayanhiti Palace, the residence of the formerly ruling Shah monarchs, appears to be the most popular of all the museums in the valley. According to the Narayanhiti office, 7,014 students, 15,466 Nepali citizens, 1,490 South Asians and 330 non-SAARC tourists came there from mid-February to mid-March.  The museum was visited by 4,886 students, 13,655 Nepalis, 830 people from SAARC states and 146 from non-SAARC states the month before. 

Buddhi Tamang, information officer of the Narayanhiti Museum, said that among the foreigners, Indians had the greatest number followed by Europeans. The number of Nepalis visiting the museum daily is also over 1,000.