The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) recognizes almost twenty meanings of the term gallery . The concept is usually used to name the extensive corridor or hallway whose roof is supported by pillars or columns and which has numerous windows. A gallery can also be an uncovered corridor that facilitates the entry of natural light into the internal environments of a home.
Let's look at some example sentences in which these two meanings can be seen: «During his convalescence, the boy used to sit on the gallery to watch the birds» , «The grandmother has several flowering plants on the gallery» , «Marcos, Don't you want to go play in the gallery? .
The notion of gallery is also used to refer to the space dedicated to the exhibition and/or sale of artistic works : paintings, sculptures, etc.: «The young Ecuadorian artist will exhibit next month in a gallery in Paris» , «When I visited Spain "I took the opportunity to visit several art galleries," "My dream is to show my paintings in a gallery in the capital and for many people to know my work."
This is one of the meanings that it receives most frequently in everyday speech internationally, since later in each Spanish-speaking region it can acquire others, more difficult to intuit. Of course, in this case we usually say art gallery , unless the concept has already appeared in the conversation and it is therefore possible to refer to it directly with the term gallery .
A shopping gallery , meanwhile, is an area that has numerous businesses. It is a kind of market or shopping center that brings together various proposals. It is important to note that this meaning is not valid or common in all Spanish-speaking countries, and this is where confusion can arise if someone says out of context "today I went to a gallery" : the interlocutor can understand that the first one refers to an art gallery, for example.
On the other hand, a gallery can be called a set of images , especially photographs. This use of the word is common on the Internet , where it usually refers to galleries that collect photos of news, events, places or celebrities: «Real Madrid champion! Don't miss the photo gallery from the Champions League final" , "Unmissable gallery with the best images of the beach" , "I was just looking at a photo gallery of the hotel and it looks very nice" .
Without a doubt, the massification of the Internet, followed by the considerable increase that people have felt about technology in recent times, has resulted in a large percentage of the population having at least one electronic device under their belt, whether it is a mobile phone, a tablet or a computer. Far from buying them to write documents and keep track of your expenses in a spreadsheet, as happened during the emergence of the desktop computer, one of the main attractions of current technology is the ease with which it allows us to take photos and create "galleries" and then share them with our acquaintances (and not so well known).
Just as in the past we would have printed our photographs to group them into albums , today we upload them directly to the servers of our favorite social networks and create themed galleries. They can be private or public, depending on our needs and the rights that providers grant us over our content.
A gallery, finally, is an underground path that is built to allow communication between different spaces. In the mines, to cite one case, there are galleries that the miners walk through.