Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla

After the Prado in Madrid, the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla is often called the most important painting gallery in Spain, and it is certainly one of the loveliest. It occupies the former Convent of La Merced Calzada, a monumental building of the seventeenth century that mixes Renaissance and Baroque, with three cloistered courtyards planted with orange trees and lined with tiles, a grand staircase under a decorated dome, and a convent church converted into the museum's most spectacular gallery. The collection spans the thirteenth to the twentieth century, but its glory is Sevillian Baroque painting of the seventeenth century, the Golden Age when Seville, enriched by the American trade, was the artistic capital of Spain. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is the star. His paintings for the Capuchin convent and other religious houses fill the old church, where they hang beneath the painted vaults much as they would have in their original setting: tender Madonnas, saints in ecstasy, and his luminous Immaculate Conceptions, the subject he made his own. Francisco de Zurbarán, the painter of monks, is represented by austere, sculptural works in which the white habits of Carthusian and Mercedarian friars seem to glow against dark backgrounds. Juan de Valdés Leal's work includes dramatic religious scenes, and Francisco de Herrera the Elder, Murillo's predecessor, is here too. The museum also has works by Velázquez and El Greco, as well as sculpture, ceramics and furniture, and later rooms trace Sevillian painting into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with romantic scenes of Andalusian life. Admission is inexpensive — free for European Union citizens — and the galleries are rarely crowded.

Visiting: according to the city tourism board, the museum opens Tuesday to Saturday from morning into the evening, and on Sunday and holiday mornings; it is closed on Mondays and has shorter hours in August. Admission is free for EU citizens on presentation of ID and costs a token amount for everyone else; confirm current conditions at the door. Allow an hour and a half to see the highlights without hurrying. The museum stands on the Plaza del Museo, a leafy square with a statue of Murillo, about ten minutes on foot north-west of the Cathedral, in the area between the old town and the river. On Sunday mornings the square fills with an art market of local painters, a pleasant browse after your visit.

A route that works: start with the medieval and Renaissance rooms on the ground floor around the first cloister, then go straight to the former church, the heart of the visit, where Murillo's great canvases hang beneath the vaults — sit for a while to take them in. Upstairs, the Zurbarán and Valdés Leal rooms complete the Golden Age, and the nineteenth-century galleries give a lighter coda, with costumbrista scenes of Sevillian life, bullfighters and fair-goers. Take time to enjoy the building itself, especially the cloisters and their tiles, which are among the finest in the city.

Fitting it in: because it opens long hours on most days, the Bellas Artes is ideal for the hottest part of a summer afternoon, when the outdoor sights are punishing. Combine it with a walk through the shopping streets of the Calle Cuna and Calle Sierpes, the Setas de Sevilla a short walk east, or a stroll down to the river and Triana. Art lovers can complete the picture at the Hospital de la Caridad, near the river, where Murillo and Valdés Leal painted cycles for the charitable brotherhood, and at the Hospital de los Venerables in Santa Cruz. Together, the three give a rounded picture of the Sevillian school at its height, when the city's painters supplied churches across Spain and the Americas, and when Murillo's sweet, luminous style shaped the image of Spanish religious art for centuries.