Faro Santander Opens: What Is Actually on View

Faro Santander opened to the public on September 8, turning Banco Santander’s former seafront headquarters into a dedicated art center. Faro says Banco Santander’s collection exceeds 1,000 works and that the opening display is a selection; El País counts 93 Gelman works on view, while EFE reports 160.

 
 

More Than 1,000 Works, but Not 1,000 on the Walls

King Felipe VI formally inaugurated Faro Santander on September 7, and the center admitted its first public visitors the following day. Fundación Banco Santander now runs the institution in the Pereda Building, the former headquarters on Paseo de Pereda.

A Faro Santander building brief says the Banco Santander Collection spans “over a thousand works.” The same document assigns one floor to a permanent but changing collection display. El País reported from the opening that only half of that fourth floor was mounted and accessible. The 1,000-plus figure therefore describes the collection’s scope, not the number hanging at launch.

Faro’s current exhibition page explicitly calls Masterworks from the Banco Santander Collection a “selection.” It reproduces ten objects and names many more artists, but it does not present those examples as a complete checklist. No exact total for the opening selection appears on the page.

Infographic by Art in Context, based on Faro Santander, El País, Fundación Banco Santander.

 
 

A Five-Century Collection Reframed by Theme

The selection runs from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Sermon of Saint John the Baptist, dated around 1537–1540, to Santander-born Juan Uslé’s I Dreamt That You Revealed from 2018. Curator María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco has divided the display into sacred stories, portraiture and figures, still lifes, and places and landscapes. That curatorial framing replaces a simple chronological march with four subjects that can carry works across centuries.

The entrance makes the method visible: Faro says works by Rubens, Antoni Tàpies, and Ángela de la Cruz are paired there. Elsewhere, El Greco’s monumental 1614 Annunciation, Velázquez’s The Tears of Saint Peter, Goya’s portrait of Valentín Bellvís de Moncada y Pizarro, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by Soledad Sevilla and Miquel Barceló show how the bank’s acquisitions can be read as art history and as institutional history at once.

The September 7 opening release gives the collection exhibition’s end only as February 2027, while the later, exhibition-specific current visitor page lists January 10, 2027.

The Annunciation (1614) by El Greco, Banco Santander Collection. Image from Fundación Banco Santander via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

 
 

The Gelman Works Are Loans, Not Part of the Thousand

The Mexican modernist display on the second floor is easy to confuse with the bank’s permanent holding because it is branded the Gelman Santander Collection. It is not part of the 1,000-plus corporate collection. Daniel Vega, Faro’s director, told El País that the works are held under a loan agreement with their owners.

The opening installation is substantial: El País reported that 93 works from a present-day group of 161 are on view, including 15 by Frida Kahlo and nine oil paintings by Diego Rivera. Faro’s own page says the Gelmans’ collection contained 96 pieces when Natasha Gelman died in 1998, while its July preview described close to 100 works in the exhibition. Those figures refer to different moments or selections and should not be collapsed into a single collection total.

Recent published counts of the Gelman group range from 156 to 161 works. The Art Newspaper described an agreement covering 160 works; El País used 161. More consequentially, Members of Defensa de la Colección Gelman filed amparo actions by June 26 seeking to annul the agreement. Faro told the publication that the Santander display complies with Mexican law and that the works will return to Mexico by 2028 at the latest.

A third opening exhibition, The Symptomatic Surreal: Leonora Carrington, sits outside both collection counts. It brings together Villa Pilar and Down Below, the two paintings Faro identifies with Carrington’s 1940 stay in Santander, along with notebook drawings and related material. After its first public display at London’s Freud Museum from July 1 to August 10, Villa Pilar is now on view at Faro Santander.

 

The Pereda Building during its conversion into Faro Santander in March 2026. Photograph by Emilio Gómez Fernández, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped.

 
 

A New Public Address, Not a First Display

Faro changes access, but the corporate artworks were not all hidden in storage before September. The foundation’s 2025 annual report listed weekday visiting hours, audio guides, and guided tours for a nearly 3,000-square-meter gallery at Grupo Santander City outside Madrid. It said more than 200 canvases were on permanent display there.

The difference is institutional and geographic. The earlier gallery sat inside the bank’s corporate campus; Faro is a dedicated public art center in Santander’s urban core, with its own exhibition program, education spaces, auditorium, and street-facing identity. Moving the collection changes who is likely to encounter it and gives curators a platform for rotations rather than merely relocating the same hang.

Even the collection’s total is not completely settled by published institutional records. A 2017 foundation report counted nearly 3,000 catalogued works, including decorative arts and an approximately 1,000-piece coin collection. Faro’s 2026 brief now says “over a thousand works” and does not explain whether it is using a narrower definition. “More than 1,000” is justified as Faro’s current claim, but it is not a reconciled inventory total.

 
 

Three Institutions, Three Different Jobs

Faro also changes Spain’s museum landscape by adding a historical and corporate collection to a compact waterfront cluster. Nearby Centro Botín, designed by Renzo Piano and open since 2017, emphasizes modern and contemporary exhibitions and artistic development. Faro combines older European painting, modern art, loans, local projects, and art-and-technology programming.

A third institution is still to come. The Museo Reina Sofía’s collection history says the Archivo Lafuente, acquired in 2022, will have its own Santander site from 2027. That project centers an archive of modern and contemporary art rather than duplicating Faro’s old-master-to-present collection display. The emerging cluster is therefore complementary on paper.

Centro Botín on Santander’s waterfront. Photograph by Coralma*, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

 
 

One Collection Floor and 93 Gelman Loans

The opening resolves several points that broad “1,000-work museum” headlines leave unclear:

• Faro Santander opened to the public on September 8 with one floor dedicated to a changing selection from Banco Santander’s collection; the institution’s “over a thousand works” is not an opening-display count.
• El País reported that 93 of the 161 Gelman Santander works are installed, and Faro’s director described them as loans from the owners rather than Banco Santander holdings.
• Fundación Banco Santander’s 2025 report documents an earlier corporate-campus gallery with more than 200 canvases, so Faro’s novelty is a central, dedicated public institution—not the first display of the bank’s art.
• Faro’s current visitor page ends Masterworks on January 10, 2027, superseding the less precise “February 2027” in the opening release.
• Faro’s current exhibition page supplies neither a complete checklist nor a first rotation date.