Museums in Spain
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry. The museum was inaugurated in 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain, with an exhibition of 250 contemporary works of art. Built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city of Bilbao to the Cantabrian Sea, it is one of several museums belonging to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and f ...
Founded: 1997 |
Location:
Bilbao, Spain
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is an art museum in Madrid, located near the Prado Museum on one of city"s main boulevards. It is known as part of the 'Golden Triangle of Art', which also includes the Prado and the Reina Sofia national galleries. The Thyssen-Bornemisza fills the historical gaps in its counterparts" collections: in the Prado"s case this includes Italian primitives and works f ...
Founded: 1992 |
Location:
Madrid, Spain
Antiquarium
Situated in the basement of Metropol Parasol, Antiquarium is a modern, well-presented archaeological museum with sections of ruins visible through glass partitions, and underfoot along walkways. These Roman and Moorish remains, dating from the first century BC to the 12th century AD, were discovered when the area was being excavated to build a car park in 2003. It was decided to incorporate them into the new Metropol Par ...
Founded: 1st century BCE |
Location:
Seville, Spain
Museo Reina Sofía
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, also called the Museo Reina Sofía) is Spain"s national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated in 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. The museum is mainly dedicated to Spanish art. Highlights of the museum include excellent collections of Spain"s two greatest 20th-century masters, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Cer ...
Founded: 1992 |
Location:
Madrid, Spain
Archaeological Museum of Granada
The Archaeological Museum of Granada was established in 1879. It is located in the Castril palace, dating from the 16th century. It hosts many artefacts from the many different civilizations that settled in Granada including the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Romans and the Arabs. It includes a beautiful Renaissance patio. The building"s façade was created in 1593.
Founded: 1879 |
Location:
Granada, Spain
Museo del Prado
Museo del Prado is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It is widely considered to have one of the world"s finest collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish Royal Collection, and the single best collection of Spanish art. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture in 1819, it also contains important collection ...
Founded: 1819 |
Location:
Madrid, Spain
Santa Cruz Museum
The Museum of Santa Cruz was an important hospital which was converted into a museum in the 19th century. The hospital was founded by Cardinal Mendoza at the end of the 15th century to centralize assistance to orphaned and abandoned children in the city. It has a remarkable Plateresque portal, work of Alonso de Covarrubias. The building has a Greek cross plant and four courtyards, two of which were completely completed ...
Founded: 15th century |
Location:
Toledo, Spain
Museo de Málaga
The Museo de Málaga, which was actually constituted in 1973, opened in 2016 in the impressive Palacio de la Aduana. It has brought together the former Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes (Provincial Museum of Fine Arts) and Museo Arqueológico Provincial.Málaga now joins Almería, Cádiz, Huelva and Jaén in having a 'provincial museum' in their respective capital cities; while Seville, Córdoba and Granada have separate f ...
Founded: 1973 |
Location:
Málaga, Spain
Museo Picasso Málaga
The Museo Picasso Málaga is a museum in the city where artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born. It opened in 2003 in the Buenavista Palace, and has 285 works donated by members of Picasso"s family. Christine Ruiz-Picasso, widow of the artist"s eldest son Paulo Ruiz-Picasso, donated to the museum 14 paintings, 9 sculptures, 44 individual drawings, a sketchbook with a further 36 drawings, 58 engravings, and 7 ceramic ...
Founded: 2003 |
Location:
Málaga, Spain
National Archaeological Museum of Spain
The National Archaeological Museum of Spain was founded in 1867 by a Royal Decree of Isabella II as a depository for numismatic, archaeological, ethnographical and decorative art collections of the Spanish monarchs. The museum was originally located in the Embajadores district of Madrid. In 1895, it moved to a building designed specifically to house it, a neoclassical design by architect Francisco Jareño, built ...
Founded: 1867 |
Location:
Madrid, Spain
Museo Nacional de Escultura
The Museo Nacional de Escultura has an extensive collection sculptural ranging from the Middle Ages to the 19th century from Region of Castile"s churchs. The museum was founded as the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts in 1842. It had its first headquarters at the Palacio de Santa Cruz. The museum houses works from the 13th to 19th centuries, executed mostly in the Central Spain, and also in other regions histor ...
Founded: 1842 |
Location:
Valladolid, Spain
Pontevedra Museum
The museum"s collections are distributed over five different venues: Santo Domingo Convent, Sarmiento Palace, the Castro Monteagudo building, and the García Flórez and Fernández López buildings. At the 18th-century Castro Monteagudo building you can see collections of archaeology, traditional and civil pre-Roman and Roman precious metalwork (Fernández de la Mora collection), as well as Spanish, Italian and Flem ...
Founded: 1929 |
Location:
Pontevedra, Spain
Museum Cerralbo
The Museum Cerralbo houses the art and historical objects collections of Enrique de Aguilera y Gamboa, Marquis of Cerralbo, who died in 1922. The museum, which is housed in the former residence of its founder, opened in 1944. The building was built in the 19th century, according to Italian taste, and it was luxuriously decorated with baroque furniture, wall paintings and expensive chandeliers. It retains to a large e ...
Founded: 1944 |
Location:
Madrid, Spain
Museo de Historia de Madrid
The Museum of History of Madrid building was formerly the Royal Hospice of San Fernando, built in 1673. The museum opened in 1929 as the Museo Minicipal (municipal museum). It was closed in 1955 the museum for building reforms, and was not reopened to the public until 1978. The museum"s permanent collection demonstrates the history of Madrid from 1561 when Madrid became the capital of Spain to the beginning of th ...
Founded: 1929 |
Location:
Madrid, Spain
Ourense Provincial Archaeological Museum
The Ourense Provincial Archaeological Museum occupies the building that was the Bishop’s Palace. It is one of the best preserved civil monumental ensembles in Romanesque style, and was declared a Historic-Artistic Monument in 1931. Its structure is a faithful testimony of the development of the city, with Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and modern elements. Its construction began in the 12th century and played a ...
Founded: 1895 |
Location:
Ourense, Spain
Museum of Navarre
The Museum of Navarra is the art museum of Navarre. It is located in the old hospital of 16th-century Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia de Pamplona, converted to museum only in 1956. The origins of the collection are works obtained by a provincial Commission in 1844, and displayed in 1910 at what is now the Cámara de los Comptos. To the right of the entrance is the facade of the church of the hospital. The exhibits in ...
Founded: 1956 |
Location:
Pamplona, Spain
Bilbao Fine Arts Museum
The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is the second largest and most visited museum in the Basque Country, after the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum and one of the richest Spanish museums outside Madrid. It houses a valuable and quite comprehensive collection of Basque, Spanish and European art from the Middle Ages to contemporary, including paintings by old masters like El Greco, Cranach, Murillo, Goya, Van Dyck, Ruisdael and Bellotto, t ...
Founded: 1908 |
Location:
Bilbao, Spain
El Greco Museum
The El Greco Museum celebrates the mannerist painter El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos, 1541–1614), who spent much of his life in Toledo, having been born in Fodele, Crete. The museum opened in 1911 and is located in the Jewish Quarter of Toledo. It consists of two buildings, a 16th-century house with a courtyard and an early 20th century building forming the museum, together with a garden. The house recreate ...
Founded: 1911 |
Location:
Toledo, Spain
Domus do Mitreo
The University Museum A Domus do Mitreo is a museum center built on the old site of the Pazo de Montenegro and annexed buildings, next to the Roman walls of Lugo. The Museum is called Domus do Mitreo because when archaeological surveys were carried out, prior to the construction of the new building, the remains of a domus appeared. This domus, during the Lower Roman Empire, was partially reformed to build a private buil ...
Founded: 2018 |
Location:
Lugo, Spain
Museo de Bellas Artes
The Museum of Fine Arts of Seville has a collection of mainly Spanish visual arts from the medieval period to the early 20th century, including a choice selection of works by artists from the so-called Golden Age of Sevillian painting during the 17th century, such as Murillo, Zurbarán, Francisco de Herrera the younger, and Valdés Leal. The building itself was built in 1594, but the museum was founded in 1839, after the ...
Founded: 1839 |
Location:
Seville, Spain