Andalucia is Spain's southernmost and most populous region, with eight provinces and two coasts. The inland cities are brutally hot in high summer; spring and autumn are the sensible windows.
The Nasrid palace complex above Granada and Spain's most visited monument. Tickets are nominative, timed and checked against a passport, and must be booked well in advance.
The Bronze Horseman stands on a boulder of rapakivi granite hauled overland on a hand-built bronze ball race, and the Alexander Column is held on its pedestal by nothing but its own weight. Older accounts swap the two stones over.
The Winter Palace was finished in 1762 for an empress who had already died, and the museum inside it began with a collection bought from a Berlin merchant whose first customer could not pay. Two Leonardos, two Raphaels and one Michelangelo sculpture, with three million objects behind them.
The two royal convents and the basilica of San Francisco el Grande: how the Descalzas collection was formed, the Relicario at La Encarnacion, the corrected dates and dome claim, and the Goya in the third chapel.
Spain's twentieth-century art and Guernica: how the painting reached Madrid, the three Picassos that are not here at all, the Nouvel extension, and the Tuesday closure.
The collection that fills the gaps the Prado and Reina Sofia leave, how Spain came to own it, the Cassirer restitution case still before the courts, and where the Barcelona pictures went.
The royal collection of the kings of Spain: where the pictures came from, Las Meninas, Goya's Black Paintings, the extension that opened in 2007, and the free evening window.
The building closed in September 2025 until 2030, what has moved and what is still open, where the collection can be seen in the meantime, the architects older accounts never name, the colour code, and the corrections on the collection's size and the Warhol.
The real size of the collection, three paintings older accounts wrongly place here, the October 2025 jewel theft and the emptied Galerie d'Apollon, the pyramid and the vanished Tuileries palace, the decade-long rebuild, and the two-tier admission introduced in 2026.
Founded in 1879 as a museum and a school. Renzo Piano's Modern Wing of 2009 added a third to its size and a second entrance from Millennium Park, and a complete Louis Sullivan trading room was rebuilt inside the building.
