{"id":334064,"date":"2025-12-08T03:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T03:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/334064\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T03:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T03:06:08","slug":"water-leak-at-the-louvre-museum-damages-hundreds-of-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/334064\/","title":{"rendered":"Water leak at the Louvre museum damages hundreds of works"},"content":{"rendered":"

A water leak has damaged several hundred works in the Louvre’s Egyptian department.<\/p>\n

The leak discovered on November 26 affected “between 300 and 400 works,” the museum’s deputy administrator Francis Steinbock said, including “egyptology journals” and “scientific documentation” used by researchers.<\/p>\n

The damaged items date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and were “extremely useful” but were “by no means unique,” Mr Steinbock told AFP on Sunday, local time.<\/p>\n

“No heritage artefacts have been affected by this damage,” he said, adding that “at this stage, we have no irreparable and definitive losses in these collections”.<\/p>\n

The incident followed an October heist in which a four-person gang raided the world’s most-visited art museum in broad daylight, stealing jewellery worth an estimated 88 million Euros ($154 million) in just seven minutes before fleeing on scooters, sparking debate over the museum’s aging infrastructure.<\/p>\n

The clues the Louvre thieves left behind<\/a><\/p>\n

A series of missteps shows the theft in the Louvre was far from a sleek operation. Instead, French authorities believe petty criminals executed it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Louvre said there would be an internal investigation into the leak.<\/p>\n

The museum said the issue was caused by the accidental opening of a valve in a heating and ventilation system, which allowed water to seep through the ceiling of the Mollien wing where the books were stored.<\/p>\n

The “completely obsolete” system had been shut down for months and was due to be replaced from September 2026, the museum administrator added.<\/p>\n

As for the works, they would “be dried, sent to a bookbinder to be restored, and then returned to the shelves,” Mr Steinbock said.<\/p>\n

In late November, the Louvre said it would raise ticket prices for most non-EU visitors, meaning US, British and Chinese tourists, among others, will have to pay 32 euros to get in.<\/p>\n

The museum told AFP the 45 per cent price hike aimed to boost annual revenues by up to 19.7 million euros, to fund structural improvements at the cultural institution.<\/p>\n

The Louvre is the world’s most-visited museum, welcoming 8.7 million visitors in 2024, 69 per cent of them from abroad.<\/p>\n

AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A water leak has damaged several hundred works in the Louvre’s Egyptian department. The leak discovered on November…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,186539,134,1571,87480,2591,186538],"class_list":{"0":"post-334064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-egyptian","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-history","17":"tag-louvre","18":"tag-paris","19":"tag-water-damage"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}