To mark Open Government Week and as part of the educational activities surrounding the bank's exhibition Allegories of What is to Come, a workshop was held on Saturday 23 May entitled Painting the Light, for families with children aged between 5 and 12. Participants were offered a close-up view of the large stained glass panel on the trading floor — one of most iconic elements in the extension to the Banco de España's Cibeles headquarters, built in the 1930s.

The workshop sold out and the six sessions were attended by more than 230 people. Visitors were first given a guided tour of the exhibition, as an introduction to the process of creating the panels, which are considered to be amongst the finest decorative ensembles of twentieth-century European institutional art deco. They were invited to examine the original sketches, or cartoons, to see the logic behind the composition and discover, for example, how the final picture is made up of many different images whose true significance only becomes obvious when they are joined.

After visiting the exhibition, visitors were taken to the trading floor where they were given binoculars to explore some of the unique details in the actual panels. The bank commissioned the prestigious studio of Maumejean Hermanos, S.A. to make the panels, seeking to project an image of modernity, progress and stability. The images include an ambitious array of images from the world of labour and technology, as a fitting allegory of a nation – and indeed a whole world – that was undergoing a process of profound transformation.

The activity – which was organised by the Banco de España's Conservation Division and staged by Mirarte – concluded with a handicrafts workshop. Using shapes, colours and motifs from the 90-year-old stained-glass windows as their reference points, participants were invited to make their own stained-glass pieces on acetate. Each of the families worked together, mirroring the real-world tradition of the actual glassmaking studios.

A similar activity – The Maumejean Laboratory – was organised at Christmas, when a stained glass window was created on a wooden support from individual contributions by different participants. The resulting installation was assembled by glassmakers Pablo and Alfonso Muñoz and is now on show in the same room as the model of the Cibeles building, one of the spaces included in the Open Doors tours.