MUSAN is a museum that you can only visit with a diving suit. Like all those erected around the world by the British sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor.
Most museums are housed in huge buildings that accommodate different themed rooms. The Ayia Napa Museum of Underwater Sculpture (MUSAN) in Cyprus, it is at the bottom of the sea.
It consists of almost one hundred statues and artistic creations located at a maximum of 10 meters deep. In reality the museum runs along an underwater slope that barely covers a couple of meters at the highest point, so can be visited with simple diving goggles, diving at the top of your lungs.
It is an artistic composition that shows children, camera in hand, running around in a forest, with some adults looking sad and pensive. You can visit it virtually in this video:
The author himself, the British artist Jason deCaires Taylor, explains us meaning: “Children can be seen playing among the sculpted trees. They remind us of our need for the natural world as a place to explore, discover, and ignite our imaginations. In the last 50 years, children have been more excluded from the wild places than before.“.
And continues: “Forest children, camera in hand as they play hide and seek in the forest, point their glasses at the human race. They hope for a future in which the mystery and magic of nature return. The need to restore the wild character of our oceans is as urgent as the need to reestablish our connection with the natural world“.
These underwater sculptures are not like the ones we can see on city streets. They are made with materials that do not harm marine life, and that also favor the proliferation of vegetation and shelter for fish, crabs and other animals. They will soon be covered in algae and marine life.
The artist Jason deCaires Taylor, who has lived in the Canary Islands for many years, has specialized in this type of ecological submerged statues. He has created in Cancun the largest Underwater Museum in the world, and in the Canary Islands themselves, in Lanzarote, the Atlantic Museum submerged, the first in Europe.
If you want to know more, a few months ago we published a news story about Ocean Atlas, the largest underwater statue in the world.