Museo Cerralbo, Madrid

Museo Cerralbo is an art museum housed in the former palace of Enrique de Aguilera y Gamboa, Marquis of Cerralbo. Its unusual character comes from the fact that the building was designed as a setting for collections and social occasions, rather than simply as an everyday home. The Marquis opened it as a private gallery in 1893, and it became a museum in 1944.

The palace was built between 1883 and 1893 by Alejandro Sureda, Luis Cabello Asó and Luis María Cabello Lapiedra, with a neoclassical design. Much of its original appearance remains: rooms filled with furniture, paintings, wall decoration and chandeliers preserve the atmosphere of a collector’s world. The collection contains more than 24,900 pieces, including archaeology, coins, oriental art, porcelain, tapestries, carpets, jewellery and clocks.

Its paintings include works associated with El Greco, Tintoretto, Zurbarán and Alonso Cano. The State accepted the Marquis’s bequest in 1924, and the museum still presents the collections of the Marquis and the Marquise of Villa-Huerta. What makes this place memorable is the continuity between the palace and the objects: you are visiting both a collection and the setting created to display it.