Louvre heist gallery to reopen to public on July 22

PARIS - The Apollo Gallery of Paris’s Louvre Museum, where French crown jewels worth €88 million (S$129 million) were stolen in 2025 in a brazen heist, will reopen to the public on July 22.

But no jewels will be on display and it will revert to its 17th century function as a state gallery, an informed source told AFP on July 20.

“The gallery will open on Wednesday,” the source said, confirming a report in Le Parisien newspaper and added Culture Minister Catherine Pegard would be present.

In an interview with Le Parisien, the museum’s president Christophe Leribault said the “collections and precious objects” that had been displayed earlier, had been removed.

On Oct 19, 2025, robbers disguised as construction workers entered the gallery using a truck-mounted lift in the morning and stole eight crown jewels, which remain missing.

For the jewellery that was not stolen, “we are going to create a secure room, a vault with no windows, in another part of the museum,” Leribault said.

“It’s a major construction project and we have to find the ideal location. And the funding,” he added.

The Louvre burglary stunned the world and revealed major security lapses at the world’s most visited museum, visited by around nine million people annually.

The theft also triggered an internal crisis at the Louvre, leading to the replacement of its president Laurence des Cars by Leribault.

Security issues at the Louvre had been pushed to the background in recent years, a parliamentary commission on the security of museums in France said in mid-May. AFP