Museo del Prado

The Prado is the reason serious art lovers come to Madrid, and it rewards even the most casual visitor. Opened in 1819 to show the royal collection to the public, it holds the deepest concentration of Spanish painting anywhere, built over centuries by Habsburg and Bourbon kings who bought, commissioned and inherited the best work of their age. The core of any visit is the trio of Spanish masters. Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV, is here in force, and his Las Meninas — the Infanta Margarita and her maids of honour, the painter himself at his easel, the king and queen glimpsed in a mirror — is one of the most discussed paintings ever made; stand in front of it long enough and the room seems to extend into the canvas. Francisco de Goya is represented across his whole arc, from sunny tapestry designs and frank royal portraits to The Second of May and The Third of May 1808, the founding images of modern war painting, and finally the Black Paintings, the nightmarish murals he painted on the walls of his own house, including Saturn Devouring His Son. El Greco's elongated, flame-coloured saints fill another gallery. Then there is the foreign collection, which would make the Prado world-class on its own: Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, Titian's portraits of Charles V, Rubens in abundance, Fra Angelico's Annunciation, Dürer, Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross. The museum is vast, so go with a plan. Timed tickets are sold online, and the free last two hours each day draw long queues, so most visitors with limited time are better off paying for a morning slot and arriving with a short list of rooms.

The building itself tells part of the story. Juan de Villanueva designed it in the 1780s for Charles III as a natural history cabinet, part of the enlightened scientific boulevard that also included the botanical garden next door and the observatory on the hill behind; it became a painting museum under Ferdinand VII and his queen, and has expanded ever since, most visibly with Rafael Moneo's brick-and-glass extension around the cloister of the neighbouring Jerónimos church, opened in 2007, which houses temporary exhibitions, the café and the shop. Across the street in the Retiro direction stands the Salón de Reinos, the surviving hall of Philip IV's Buen Retiro palace, being turned into another wing of the museum. In 2021 the whole ensemble — the Paseo del Prado and the Retiro park — was listed by UNESCO as the Landscape of Light.

Visiting well: the museum opens daily, generally from ten in the morning to eight in the evening Monday to Saturday and to seven on Sundays and holidays, with closures on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December and shorter hours on a few holiday eves. Entry to the permanent collection is free for the last two hours of each day, but the queue starts forming well before, the galleries are at their busiest and you will have less than two hours, so treat it as a second visit rather than your only one. Under-eighteens enter free, and students and seniors qualify for reductions. The ticket office and several doors are spread around the building, so check which entrance your ticket specifies. Bags beyond a small size must be checked, and photography is not allowed in the galleries. If you plan to see the Thyssen and the Reina Sofía as well, the combined Paseo del Arte pass saves money on the three.

A two-hour route that works: start upstairs with Velázquez in the great central gallery and the oval room around Las Meninas, move to the Goya rooms on the same floor for the royal portraits and the two May paintings, then go down to the ground floor for the Black Paintings, which are best seen last, when you have the stamina for them. Finish with Bosch and the Flemish masters. With more time, add El Greco, the Titians and Rubens, and the Dauphin's Treasure of jewelled vessels in the basement. Lunch is better outside than in the busy café: walk up into the Barrio de las Letras, behind the museum, for a set menu in a neighbourhood tavern, then rest in the Retiro. The Prado is the anchor of any Madrid trip; book it first and build the rest of the day around it.