Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid

At the southern end of Madrid’s grand museum boulevard, a long eighteenth-century hospital begun under Charles III now holds what may be the most famous painting of the twentieth century. The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Spain’s national museum of modern and contemporary art, is where Picasso’s Guernica hangs, surrounded by the work of Dalí, Miró, Juan Gris and the Spanish avant-garde around them. On our Small Group Tour of Spain & Portugal, a local guide brings you here on the first full day in the capital, two days before the Prado. Seeing the two collections so close together makes clear how far Spanish art travelled between Velázquez and the Spanish Civil War.

From royal hospital to national museum

For almost four centuries this site served the sick. In the sixteenth century Philip II gathered the scattered hospitals of his court onto this ground, founding the General Hospital of Madrid. In the eighteenth century Charles III resolved to build a new one. José de Hermosilla began the work and his successor, the Italian-born architect Francesco Sabatini, was responsible for much of what stands today. Work stopped on Charles III’s death, and in 1788 the building was taken into use as a hospital, though only a third of Sabatini’s design had been built. That austere, rational block, with its long rows of identical windows, still gives the museum its character.

The hospital closed in 1965 and the building was at risk until a royal decree of 1977 declared it a Historic-Artistic Monument. Restoration began in 1980 under the architect Antonio Fernández Alba. In 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened as a venue for temporary exhibitions, named for Queen Sofía, and on 27 May 1988 a royal decree made it a national museum, taking over the holdings of the former Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art. The final works of the late 1980s added the three glass-and-steel lift towers on the main façade, designed with the British architect Ian Ritchie. They remain the most recognisable feature of the building from the street. King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía formally opened the museum on 31 October 1990, and the permanent collection went on display on 10 September 1992.

Jean Nouvel’s red roof

By the late 1990s the museum had outgrown Sabatini’s compact block. The Ministry of Culture launched an international competition in 1999, won by the French architect Jean Nouvel, and his extension opened in 2005. Rather than one large building, Nouvel designed three separate ones grouped around a triangular, partly covered courtyard that opens towards the Ronda de Atocha. One houses the library and documentation centre, another holds temporary exhibition galleries with an internal link to the old hospital, and the third, at the apex, contains two auditoriums and a café-restaurant.

Tying them together is a vast canopy of red lacquered aluminium, which aligns with the old hospital without touching its cornice. Broad rectangular openings in the roof let daylight fall into the courtyard below, and the contrast between Sabatini’s pale stone and Nouvel’s glossy red is one of the more satisfying juxtapositions of old and new architecture in Spain. The extension’s rooftop terrace has since been converted into an open-air gallery, with three large kinetic sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s.

Guernica: from the 1937 Paris pavilion to Madrid

On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Guernica was bombed. Picasso had already accepted a commission from the government of the Spanish Republic for its pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, a building designed by Josep Lluís Sert and Luis Lacasa, and the attack became his subject. The result is an oil on canvas almost eight metres wide (349.3 by 776.6 centimetres), painted in black, white and greys, which went on show in the pavilion that summer alongside other works of Republican propaganda and art.

The painting did not come to Spain for more than four decades. It was held for many years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and arrived in Madrid on 10 September 1981, during Spain’s transition to democracy. It was first shown in the Casón del Buen Retiro, then part of the Prado, where it opened to the public on 24 October 1981. In July 1992 it was moved to the Reina Sofía, a transfer that stirred real debate at the time about the painter’s wishes and the safety of the canvas. Today it hangs in a setting devoted to the art of the war years, with Picasso’s preparatory drawings, a model of the Paris pavilion and models of works shown there by Alexander Calder, Alberto Sánchez and Joan Miró.

Where is Guernica in the Reina Sofía?

Guernica hangs on the second floor of the Sabatini Building, the original hospital, where it was installed in 1992. That floor is devoted to the avant-garde and the years of the Spanish Civil War, so the painting sits at the end of a sequence that explains how Spanish art arrived at it. Displays are rehung from time to time, so check the floor plan on the museum’s official website before you go.

Dalí, Miró, Juan Gris and the Spanish avant-garde

The second floor covers roughly the years 1900 to 1945, and for many visitors it is the heart of the museum. Picasso is here well beyond Guernica, from the early Mujer en azul (1901) to Cabeza de mujer llorando con pañuelo (1937), one of the weeping women he painted in the months after it. Juan Gris, the Madrid-born painter who worked alongside Picasso and Braque in Paris, is represented by Cubist still lifes such as La bouteille d’anis (1914), shown near Braque and Fernand Léger.

The young Salvador Dalí appears in Muchacha en la ventana (1925), a calm, precise portrait of his sister looking out to sea that predates his Surrealist years. Joan Miró’s Hombre con pipa (1925) and the earlier La casa de la palmera (1918) show him moving from a vivid, detailed realism towards the signs and symbols of his later work. Less familiar names repay the time too: Ángeles Santos’s Tertulia (1929), painted when she was still a teenager, and José Gutiérrez Solana’s sombre group portrait of the literary gathering at Madrid’s Café de Pombo (1920) give a strong sense of the Spanish world these artists came from. Beyond the second floor, the collection continues through post-war Spanish abstraction, with artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Eduardo Chillida and Antonio Saura, and on to international contemporary art.

How is the Reina Sofía collection arranged?

The collection is grouped by themes rather than in strict chronological order, which is why a room of paintings may share space with films, posters, photographs and architectural models of the same period. The museum holds more than 31,000 works, and a small proportion is on display at any time. The current presentation was introduced in 2021 across six floors, four in the Sabatini Building and two in the Nouvel extension. The collection is rehung in stages, so rooms can change between visits. The museum’s official website has the current floor plan and visiting information, including opening hours.

The Reina Sofía on Madrid’s Paseo del Arte

The Reina Sofía sits at the southern end of the Paseo del Prado, near Atocha station, and forms one corner of what Madrid calls the Paseo del Arte, its art walk, together with the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. The three collections fit together neatly: the Prado for the old masters, the Thyssen for a sweep of European painting across several centuries, and the Reina Sofía for the twentieth century and after. Our guide to the Prado Museum and its old masters explains why the two great national collections reward being seen in sequence, and the Madrid highlights article places all three within a wider walk through the city.

On the tour, the Reina Sofía follows earlier encounters with modern art. On Day 6 the group spends two to three hours at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Frank Gehry’s titanium landmark on the Nervión, viewing its collection of contemporary works. Two days later, at the Reina Sofía, you move from the international present back to the Spanish avant-garde that helped bring it about.

How long should you allow at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid?

On our tour, the Reina Sofía shares a full guided day with the Royal Palace, so plan on a focused visit rather than a survey of all six floors. Day 8 begins with a local guide exploring the city’s highlights, including entrance to the Royal Palace, and our article on the Royal Palace of Madrid covers the other half of that day. If you would like longer among the moderns, Day 10 follows the guided Prado visit with free time, which gives you the chance to return to the Reina Sofía on your own and pace the two collections as suits you.

How much walking does the museum visit involve?

Expect a good deal of standing and slow walking across large galleries, set within a tour graded Level 2, Moderate. The tour page asks that travellers can manage three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground, and can climb and descend stairs and carry their own luggage. Inside the museum the glass lift towers connect the floors of the Sabatini Building, which saves climbing between the galleries.

Madrid gives you four nights to take all this in, with the Royal Palace and the Reina Sofía on Day 8, a walking tour of Toledo on Day 9 and the Prado on Day 10. The evening of Day 8 ends with a guided tapas tour and a walk to the Mercado San Miguel, a lighter counterpoint to a day of palaces and paintings. Our overview of the Spain and Portugal itinerary follows the full route from Barcelona and the Basque Country to Granada, in a small group of up to 16 travellers.

Few rooms anywhere carry the weight of the one that holds Guernica, and few museums frame a single painting with such care. See it on the same day as the Bourbon state rooms of the Royal Palace, and the distance between royal Madrid and the Madrid of the Republic, the war and the long return to democracy becomes something you feel rather than read about. It is one of the moments that makes a journey through Spain worth taking slowly, in good company, with time to look.