Museum heists are rising - and it's affecting visitors

A spate of brazen thefts has rocked European museums. Now, some institutions are rethinking what's worth displaying.

Visitors stepping into the Louvre's Galerie d'Apollon today will come face to face with more than 60m (198ft) of painted ceilings and dazzling sculptures. What they won't find, however, are the iconic treasures that once glittered inside its display cases.

The gallery reopened in July 2026, nine months after thieves made off with France's crown jewels in one of the most audacious museum robberies in recent memory. The surviving gemstones have since been moved elsewhere while the Louvre determines how to display them more securely.

The Louvre heist is just one example of how a recent string of museum thefts across Europe is changing what travellers can actually see in these beloved institutions.

On 27 August, thieves broke into the Museum of Villena in south-eastern Spain. In just four minutes, they made off with an extraordinary collection of Bronze Age bowls, bottles, bracelets and other objects that included nearly 10kg (22lb) of gold. Less than two weeks later, burglars entered the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera and took four paintings – two were abandoned in nearby gardens as the thieves fled, while two others remain missing. In July, thieves posing as ordinary visitors stole the 2,500-year-old gold torque of Vix from a museum in Burgundy.

According to Europol, such incidents have risen sharply and are becoming increasingly brazen. As one museum security expert in Belgium told the BBC: "Every museum in the world is stressing right now."

Jean-Yves Goriou, head of the EU Organised Crime Unit at Europol, says information shared by member states shows "a clear and steep increase in the number of museum robbery cases since around 2022/2023".

Some have also become more forceful: thieves have used sledgehammers and axes to smash display cases, explosives to blow through museum entrances and firearms to intimidate staff and visitors; in other cases, museum employees have been assaulted or restrained.

Experts say the fact that many museums are publicly accessible makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft. "Museums are most likely doing what they can, given budget constraints and the fact that they are – by design – open to the public," Goriou says.

For generations, that openness has allowed almost anyone to stand within a few feet of an Egyptian sarcophagus or a Renaissance painting. But as museums seek to better protect their most prized pieces, it's changing the visitor experience.

Nothing like the real thing

Travellers to the Louvre who find the Galerie d'Apollon without its jewels still have tens of thousands of other objects to see. But for a smaller museum, losing one object can make a dramatic difference for would-be visitors.

The so-called "Treasure of Villena" that was stolen in August wasn't simply one collection among many in the city's museum. It was inextricably linked with Villena itself: dozens of pieces of Bronze Age gold, silver, amber and iron hidden inside a vessel for roughly three millennia before an archaeologist brought them back into the light in 1963.

Likewise, the Vix torque was the defining object of the Musée du Pays Châtillonnais in Burgundy. The 480g (1lb) gold necklace was discovered in the burial chamber of a Celtic woman who died around 500BC,........

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