Museo del Prado

The building now called the Prado was designed in 1785 by Juan de Villanueva, an architect of the Spanish Enlightenment, on the order of Charles III, who intended it for a cabinet of natural history. The building's final function was not decided until Charles's grandson Ferdinand VII, encouraged by his wife Queen María Isabel de Braganza, chose to use it as a royal museum of painting and sculpture.

It opened to the public in November 1819, first called the National Museum of Painting and Sculpture, later renamed the Museo Nacional del Prado. Its earliest catalogue, published that same year and devoted wholly to Spanish painting, listed 311 pictures, though the building then held 1,510 drawn from the royal residences.

The collection descends from the Spanish royal holdings, and it remains the finest single collection of Spanish art anywhere, running from the twelfth century to the early twentieth. Goya is the artist represented more fully than any other.

Its high points run from Bosch and El Greco through Rubens and Titian to Velázquez, among the highlights of the collection.

The museum's own plan divides the paintings by national school, from Spanish painting up to 1800 and Italian and French painting up to 1800, to the Flemish and northern schools, the nineteenth century, and the cabinets of prints, drawings and sculpture.

A smaller British collection of twenty-eight pictures, most of them portraits from around 1750 to 1850, makes up one of just two notable groups of British art in Spain.