Museo del Prado

Overview

The Museo del Prado is Spain’s national art museum, open on the Paseo del Prado in Madrid since November 1819 and built around the paintings the Spanish Crown had been accumulating since the 16th century. It holds European art from the 12th century to the early 20th, and the single best collection of Spanish painting anywhere.

The reason to give it a morning rather than an hour is the concentration. Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, Bosch, Titian and Rubens are all here in depth, not as one representative canvas each. Goya alone is the most extensively represented artist in the building, from court portraits to the Black Paintings.

General admission is 15 euros, and the Collection is free to everyone for the last two hours before closing. The Prado also anchors one end of Madrid’s Golden Triangle of Art, with the Museo Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza a short walk down the same boulevard. The Paseo del Prado itself went onto the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2021.

Collection

Spanish painting is the spine, and the 17th century is where it thickens. Velázquez holds Las Meninas, The Surrender of Breda, The Triumph of Bacchus and Mars Resting. Zurbarán contributes the Agnus Dei and the Still Life with Pots, Ribera the Jacob’s Dream, Murillo the Inmaculada de Soult. El Greco is here in quantity as well: the Holy Trinity, The Knight with His Hand on His Breast, the Madrid Adoration of the Shepherds.

Goya gets the most wall of anyone, and he gets it twice over. The public Goya painted The Third of May 1808 in 1814 and the two Majas around 1797 to 1807. The private Goya produced the Black Paintings between 1819 and 1823, Saturn Devouring His Son and The Dog among them.

The Flemish and Netherlandish rooms are the other half of the argument, and they are usually quieter. Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1480 and 1505, is the crowd magnet, but Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross of about 1435 is the painting people stand longest in front of. Bruegel the Elder supplies The Triumph of Death and The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, Rubens The Three Graces and The Judgement of Paris, Patinir the Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx. Dürer’s Self-portrait of 1498 and his Adam and Eve of 1507 sit nearby, along with Rembrandt’s Artemisia.

The Italian wing is where you get room to breathe. Titian is the heavyweight, with the Bacchanal of the Andrians, the Equestrian Portrait of Charles V, La Gloria and The Fall of Man. Raphael has The Pearl, the Portrait of a Cardinal and Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary. Add Mantegna’s Death of the Virgin, Tintoretto’s Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet, Antonello da Messina’s The Dead Christ Supported by an Angel, Caravaggio’s David and Goliath, and Fra Angelico’s Annunciation of 1430 to 1432.

The last stretch is 19th-century Spanish painting, and it is the part most visitors walk past. Most of it arrived with the closure of the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1971: José and Federico de Madrazo, Vicente López, Carlos de Haes, Eduardo Rosales and Sorolla. Antonio Gisbert’s Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga, painted in 1882, is the one that stops people cold.

Paintings are not the whole museum. The Prado also keeps the Dauphin’s Treasure, a body of sculpture, and the drawings and prints collections, which come out in rotation rather than hanging permanently. More than 2,300 paintings have joined the collection by bequest, donation and purchase since the museum was founded.

Visiting

There are three doors, and picking the wrong one costs you twenty minutes. The Goya entrance on Calle Felipe IV has the ticket offices and leads to the Collection. The Jerónimos entrance, also on Calle Felipe IV, covers both the Collection and the temporary exhibitions, and gives priority access to visitors with reduced mobility, people with baby strollers, and ICOM, FAMP and American Friends members. The Murillo entrance on Plaza de Murillo is for educational groups.

Opening hours are 10:00 to 20:00 Monday to Saturday and 10:00 to 19:00 on Sundays and public holidays. The museum closes on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December, and runs a short 10:00 to 14:00 day on 6 January, 24 December and 31 December. You need a time pass to get in, so you choose your date and slot when you buy. Last admission is 30 minutes before closing, and staff start asking visitors to leave the galleries 10 minutes before.

General admission is 15 euros and covers the Collection and the temporary exhibitions together. Reduced admission is 7.50 euros for over 65s, youth card holders and members of large families. Entry is free for under 18s, students aged 18 to 25, people with a disability of 33% or more, the legally unemployed and active teaching staff, among others. Free and reduced tickets require official, valid, up-to-date proof at the ticket office on the day of the visit, not a scan on your phone from last year.

The last two hours before closing are free for everyone, which means 18:00 to 20:00 Monday to Saturday and 17:00 to 19:00 on Sundays and holidays. Those tickets are handed out at the ticket office only and are subject to capacity, so it is a queue and a cap rather than a guarantee. Temporary exhibitions are half price in the same window. Add-ons are priced separately: 5 euros for the audio guide, 10 euros for a guided visit, 24 euros for admission with a copy of the Prado Guide, and 50 euros per person for the private 09:00 to 10:00 visit before the museum opens, which needs a minimum of 12 people and booking at least 72 hours ahead.

Inside, the galleries run by school and by century rather than by fame, so the free map matters more here than at most museums. Rooms get rehung, and paintings travel, so treat any room number you read in advance as a suggestion. If you want a shortcut, the museum publishes an accessible map built around a route of 10 masterpieces, available at the information desks.

The building itself is barrier free: accessible toilets, lifts, ramps and platforms throughout, an induction loop in the auditorium and at the counters, guide dogs welcome, and wheelchairs and baby strollers lent free at the cloakroom. At the audio guide desks you can borrow a Signoguide in Spanish Sign Language with subtitles covering 52 works, or audio description for 53, both free. The shop and cafeteria sit in Rafael Moneo’s glass-roofed wedge of a foyer, which was built partly to get them out of the galleries.

History

The building was never meant to hold paintings. Juan de Villanueva designed it in 1785 on the orders of Charles III as a Natural History Cabinet, part of a scheme to line the Paseo del Prado with scientific institutions. Work stopped at the end of the reign and through the Peninsular War, during which Napoleonic troops used the premises as cavalry headquarters and a gunpowder store. Charles III’s grandson Ferdinand VII, pushed by his wife Queen María Isabel de Braganza, decided instead to make it a Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures, and it opened to the public in November 1819.

It stopped being royal property in 1868, when Isabella II was deposed, the museum was nationalised and it took the name Museo del Prado. Growth after that came mostly from swallowing other institutions and other people’s estates. The Museo de la Trinidad closed into it in 1872, bringing Pedro Berruguete altarpieces from Ávila and five El Greco canvases painted for the Colegio de doña María de Aragón. The Museo de Arte Moderno followed in 1971. Private bequests filled the gaps: Pablo Bosch’s medals, Pedro Fernández Durán’s drawings and decorative art along with Van der Weyden’s Duran Madonna, and Ramón de Errazu’s 19th-century paintings.

Physically, the Prado has been under scaffolding for most of its life. The first enlargement came in 1918, and short pavilions went up at the rear between 1900 and 1960. The Casón del Buen Retiro, fitted out for up to 400 paintings, held the bulk of the 20th-century collection from 1971 to 1997. A 1993 extension proposed by then director Felipe Garin was dropped after a wave of criticism, and in the late 1990s roof work forced Las Meninas to change galleries twice.

The version you walk through today is Rafael Moneo’s. His 2007 project took the exhibition space to 16,000 square metres, put the shops and cafeteria into a wedge-shaped underground foyer, and freed the old rooms for pictures. The 16th-century Cloister of Jerónimo was dismantled stone by stone to underpin the surrounding buildings and rebuilt inside the extension, with hydraulic jacks holding the basement walls up during construction.

The next chapter is the Hall of Realms, once part of the Buen Retiro palace and an army museum until 2005. The Prado bought it in 2015, and in November 2016 chose Norman Foster and Carlos Rubio Carvajal to convert it, from a shortlist drawn out of 47 international teams. The Spanish government approved the plans and put 36 million euros behind them in 2021.

That buying power shows in the recent acquisitions list: El Greco’s The Fable in 1993 and his Flight into Egypt in 2001, Goya’s The Countess of Chinchón in 2000, and Velázquez’s Portrait of Ferdinando Brandani in 2003.

Tips

• Buy online and pick your slot. Entry is timed, so you select a date and time at purchase, and the ticket already covers the temporary exhibitions.

• The free window is 18:00 to 20:00 Monday to Saturday and 17:00 to 19:00 on Sundays and holidays, but those tickets come from the ticket office and stop when capacity is reached. Turn up well before it opens or treat it as a bonus rather than a plan.

• Last admission is 30 minutes before closing and guards clear the rooms 10 minutes before the hour, so arriving at 19:30 on a Tuesday buys you about 20 usable minutes.

• Travel light. Suitcases and anything bulkier than 40 by 40 centimetres are refused, along with scooters, bicycles and animals other than authorised ones, and locker capacity is limited.

• Children under 14 have to be accompanied by an adult.

• If you are coming as a group, reserve at least 24 hours ahead, or 72 hours for the 09:00 to 10:00 private visit. Since 2026 the maximum group size has been 20 people rather than 30, so tours that used to run once now run twice.

• Doing all three Golden Triangle museums? The Art Walk pass is 32.80 euros and covers one visit each to the Prado, the Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, valid for a year from purchase, so you do not have to cram them into one weekend.

• Nearest metro stations are Banco de España at 650 metres and Estación del Arte at 800 metres, on lines 1 and 2. The Museo del Prado stop for the Botanical Garden is 64 metres from the door, and there are BiciMAD docks on Calle Espalter, Calle Jesús and Calle Almadén.

• Coming from the airport, take metro line 8 and change to lines 4 and 2, or use the C1 and C10 Cercanías lines to Recoletos or Atocha.

• Budget three to four hours if you want the main works without marching, and accept that you are seeing roughly 1,300 of about 7,600 paintings. One wing done properly beats the whole building done at speed.