On October 12, inside Madrid’s Naval Museum, two climate activists defaced a 133-year-old large painting of Christopher Columbus by splashing it with red paint. The act, captured on video, coincided with Spain’s national observance of Columbus Day—a moment the protesters sought to reframe as one of mourning rather than celebration.
The artwork, First Tribute to Christopher Columbus (1892) by Spanish painter José Garnelo, has long stood as a monumental ode to the explorer’s arrival in the Americas. But that same reverence, the activists argued, conceals the brutal colonial legacy that followed. As security guards rushed to intervene, the pair unfurled a banner reading: “October 12, nothing to celebrate. Ecosocial justice.”
The women, members of the group Futuro Vegetal (“Vegetarian Future”), were arrested on site and now face charges of damaging cultural heritage. Museum officials later confirmed that the painting had been cleaned and stabilized but would require further restoration to fully recover from the damage.
In their statement, Futuro Vegetal described the protest as both ecological and anti-colonial. The red paint, they said, symbolized the blood of Indigenous peoples and the continuing violence of extractive capitalism. “Columbus is not a hero,” the group wrote. “He represents the genocide of entire peoples and the beginning of a system that destroys life on Earth.”
Spain’s annual celebration of October 12—known as both Hispanic Day and the Day of the National Fiesta—has increasingly become a point of tension. For many, it honors the country’s global legacy; for others, it represents centuries of conquest and exploitation. By attacking the Columbus mural, the activists sought to confront this contradiction directly within an institution dedicated to Spain’s imperial past.
The incident echoes similar acts of protest that have rippled through museums across Europe and the United States in recent years. Groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion have turned cultural spaces into stages for environmental alarm, targeting revered artworks to draw attention to the climate crisis. From soup hurled at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to glue-ons before Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, these performances blur the line between vandalism and urgent political theater.
Later that same day, members of Futuro Vegetal staged another demonstration near Picasso’s Guernica at the Reina Sofía Museum. Their message remained consistent: art and history cannot remain neutral when the planet is in peril.
Still, the damage to Garnelo’s mural provoked swift condemnation from officials and curators. Madrid’s Naval Museum issued a statement affirming that while freedom of expression is a democratic right, “attacking cultural heritage is not a legitimate form of protest.” Restoration specialists have since been tasked with assessing the long-term effects of the red pigment on the painting’s 19th-century surface.
The clash highlights a larger question at the heart of contemporary protest: how to challenge entrenched narratives without endangering the art that embodies them. For the activists, the mural was not a masterpiece to protect but a symbol to confront—a relic of conquest and denial. For the museum, it was an artifact of national history, deserving preservation even amid critique.
As restoration begins, the image of red streaks bleeding across Columbus’s figure lingers in the public imagination. Whether seen as defacement or revelation, the act forces viewers to look again—at both the painting and the history it represents.
In the end, the confrontation between climate activism and cultural preservation underscores a shared paradox: both seek to safeguard the future, though by vastly different means. One defends the past’s material remains; the other demands a moral and ecological reckoning.
The red paint has been scrubbed away, but the questions it raised—about empire, environment, and the politics of remembrance—remain vividly, almost indelibly, on the surface of collective memory.