Museo del Prado

The Prado is in Madrid, the capital city of Spain.

It is a long stone building with tall columns at the doors. Inside are rooms and rooms of paintings. Kings and queens of Spain collected many of them long ago.

The Prado stands beside a wide, tree-lined avenue in Madrid called the Paseo del Prado. It holds the world's richest collection of Spanish painting.

The collection has about 8,600 paintings and more than 700 sculptures. Many were collected over hundreds of years by Spain's kings and queens. Visitors come to see famous works by Spanish painters such as El Greco, Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, and also by great Italian and Flemish artists. In 2019 the museum celebrated its 200th birthday.

The Museo del Prado stands on the Paseo del Prado, the tree-lined avenue at the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of Arts and Sciences" (2021). Britannica describes the museum as housing the world's richest and most comprehensive collection of Spanish painting, together with masterpieces of other European schools, especially Italian and Flemish.

The collection grew from the paintings gathered by Spain's Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs. Madrid's tourism office gives it as 8,600 paintings and more than 700 sculptures; Britannica adds a fine collection of Greco-Roman statuary. The museum marked its bicentenary in 2019 and, with the Thyssen-Bornemisza and Reina Sofia museums nearby, anchors what Madrid calls the Paseo del Arte.

One famous painting is called Las Meninas. It shows a princess with the girls who help her.

The painter put himself in the picture too! Can you spot the king and queen in the mirror at the back?

One of the Prado's masterpieces is Las Meninas, painted by Diego Velázquez around 1656. It shows the princess Margarita with her maids of honor, the meninas. Velázquez painted himself at the left, standing at a huge canvas, and the king and queen appear as reflections in a mirror at the back of the room.

The museum also has the most complete collections in the world of El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. You can see Goya's designs for tapestries, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting in three panels by Hieronymus Bosch.

Among its masterpieces is Velázquez's Las Meninas (about 1656): Britannica's caption identifies the artist's self-portrait at the left, the reflections of Philip IV and Queen Mariana in the mirror at the back of the room, and the infanta Margarita with her meninas, or maids of honor, in the foreground. Britannica credits the Prado with the most complete collections in the world of El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, and important works by Ribera, Zurbarán, Bosch, Bruegel the Elder, Raphael, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Watteau.

Madrid's tourism office highlights Goya's tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory and the Black Paintings from the walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo. Britannica also notes that Picasso's Guernica entered the collection in 1981 but was moved to the Reina Sofia museum in 1992, as the Prado chose to focus on works from the 19th century and earlier.

Today, people from all over the world visit the Prado.

They walk from room to room and look closely at the paintings. Experts also look after the old paintings, cleaning and fixing them carefully.

The Prado is the star of Madrid's Paseo del Arte, or Art Walk, together with two other big museums nearby, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofia. Because there are so many paintings, the museum suggests short tours of 1, 2 or 3 hours to see the most important ones.

Behind the scenes, the new wing has workshops where experts restore old paintings. Since 2021 the Prado has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes the Paseo del Prado avenue and the Retiro gardens.

Madrid's tourism office calls the Prado the crown jewel of the Paseo del Arte, with the Thyssen-Bornemisza and Reina Sofia museums, and notes that the museum's website offers 1-, 2- and 3-hour routes through its key works. A permanent display opened in 2021 in rooms 100 to 102 of the Villanueva building tells the museum's more than 200-year history through 265 items, including photographs and nine architectural models.

In 2021 UNESCO inscribed "Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of Arts and Sciences", an 18th-century urban plan of avenues, gardens and buildings for the arts and sciences, on the World Heritage List; UNESCO lists the Prado among the buildings that preserve their original use.