Much before the Guggenheim Bilbao or the forthcoming Pompidou offshoot (“The Centre Pompidou Pops Up in Málaga“), the Spanish town of Genalguacil was already using contemporary art is a means to attract tourism and revenue, reports the New York Times. The atmosphere is certainly low-key. In this southern village of only 552 inhabitants, there are no grand buildings designed by starchitects nor blockbuster exhibitions with household names.

What they do have, instead, is a biennial art festival, in which a dozen of artists are invited to do a fully-funded residency in exchange for leaving the resulting artworks on permanent display in the village. With 12 editions under its belt, the Encuentros de Arte festival is turning Genalguacil into a real sculpture park.

Participants are mostly emerging local artist and the festival has proved to be a good platform for some, which managed to get their first institutional shows after the experience. The last edition, which took place last summer, was the most ambitious to date, with a total budget of $129,000 (€100,000).

An exhibition of 18 wood carvings by Picasso (whose native town was Málaga, only a 100 km west of Genalguacil) ran simultaneously, boosting visitor figures. The carvings were shown in the village’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a huge 3-story building constructed in 2004—before Spain’s housing bubble burst—ostensibly with the purpose of showing artworks from the festival that are not suitable to be displayed outdoors.