Spain and Portugal for Visitors

One of the world's greatest art galleries, comparable to the Louvre, the Hermitage or the Rijksmuseum. The Prado has thousands of drawings, prints, decorative objects and sculptures, but the most important and impressive part of its collection is its 8,600 paintings, including the world's best collections of works by Spanish painters Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, as well as of Hieronymus Bosch.

The Palacio de Villanueva, the building housing the Museo del Prado, is considered the most ambitious Spanish Neoclassical work. It is named after the architect who designed it, commissioned by Spain's enlightened despot King Charles III in 1786, as part of a complex dedicated to science, including the adjacent Botanical Garden and Astronomical Observatory, indeed, its originally intended purpose was the study of natural history. It took years to build, and was still unfinished when the Spanish War of Independence (from Napoleonic France - 1808-14) arrived and it was used as a French cavalry barracks. To make matters worse, the building was stripped of its lead, and the ensuing leakage caused serious damage. After the war, at the behest of his wife, Isabel of Braganza, new Spanish King Ferdinand VII had the building restored and converted for use as the Museo Real de Pinturas, Royal Painting Museum or gallery, . This was inaugurated in 1819, making it one of the oldest public art galleries in the world (the Louvre was only opened in 1793). It remained in royal hands, however, until the deposition of Isabella II led to the brief (1868-1874) suspension of the Bourbon dynasty and the nationalization of a number of royal properties, including what whas thereafter referred to as the Museo del Prado.

The royal collections comprising the Prado's patrimony at the time of nationalization amounted to over 3,000 items of Spanish, Flemish, German, French and Italian art from the 15th to the 19th century. These were enormously swollen almost immediately by the incorporation of the contents of the Museo de la Trinidad, so called after the former convent in the Calle Atocha which housed it. This collection was of itself controversial, being made up of works seized from monasteries and convents in the 1830's in the process called desamortización, the tardy Spanish version of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.

Although the Prado has never ceased to acquire new works, these two sources, the royal collections and that of the Museo de la Trinidad, give it something of a homogeneous character which some find hard going. For example, the most modern painter represented, in thinking if not chronology, is Goya, often considered a forerunner of impressionism, but impressionism itself is not represented.

Other painters whose works hang in the Prado are Antonello da Messina, Bartolomé Bermejo, Brueghel de Velours, Correggio, Alberto Durero, Hieronymus Bosch (El Bosco in Spanish), El Greco, Fra Angelico, Francisco de Goya, Claudio de Lorena, Andrea Mantegna, Melozzo da Forli, Hans Memling, Antonio Moro, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Joachim Patinir, Nicolás Poussin, Rafael Sanzio, Rembrandt, José de Ribera, Peter Paul Rubens, Alonso Sánchez Coello, Il Tintoretto, Titian, Rogier Van der Weyden, Diego de Silva y Velázquez, Paolo Veronese, and Francisco de Zurbarán.

The Casón del Buen Retiro, a nearby palace acquired to house the Prado's more modern works, is currently closed for renovation. In any case, the Prado experience is best complemented with a visit to at least one of the other two galleries completing the "Golden Triangle," the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, both of which have been enlarged recently. But pace yourself - it is perhaps easier to "museum out" in Madrid than anywhere else on Earth, and that is not the idea.

Click here for Prado Museum opening hours, entrance prices, and how to get there.