Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (In Pictures)

So, I’m finally (finally!) wrapping up my series of photographs from our family trip to Spain this past spring. If you’re not a subscriber to this blog (and why wouldn’t you be? SUBSCRIBE HERE), here’s what you missed: We flew from Miami, landing in Madrid, where we spent our first two days and visited the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. We then rented a car and drove about 70 miles NW to the spectacular Walls of Ávila (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). We continued driving another 95 miles SW to our first stop in Spain’s Extremadura region (our main area of exploration on this trip), the city of Plasencia.

From Plasencia, we drove 13 miles south through Monfragüe National Park, the largest and best preserved Mediterranean forest worldwide and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and then drove another 28 miles south to the medieval city of Trujillo. From Trujillo, we drove about 50 miles east to the Royal Monastery of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (another UNESCO World Heritage Site) in Guadalupe, and then another 78 miles SE to visit the Roman Theatre in Mérida (yet another UNESCO World Heritage site) then driving about 45 miles north to the the capital city of the province of Extremadura, Cáceres (and yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site). On our final day in Extremadura, we took a short 20 minute drive further west to visit the Natural Monument of Los Barruecos before embarking on a three hour drive NE back to Madrid.

Which brings us to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Queen Sofia Arts Center), Spain’s national museum of 20th-century art which opened its doors in September of 1990 and is named for Queen Sofía, wife of King Juan Carlos I, who reigned from 1975 to 2014. The museum is mainly dedicated to Spanish art. Highlights of the museum include excellent collections of Spain’s two greatest 20th-century masters, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Certainly, the most famous masterpiece in the museum is Picasso’s painting “Guernica”.

The original building was home to the San Carlos Hospital, opened by King Felipe II in the sixteenth century. The present building is the work of architects José de Hermosilla and Francisco Sabatini, who was responsible for a large part of its construction. Since then, the building has undergone many transformations with its final renovations occurring in the late 1980s. In 1992, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia inaugurated the permanent collection, and thus named it the Reina Sofia after the Queen herself.

The museum, which we visited on our last day in Madrid before flying back home, has a collection of over 21,000 artworks from the 20th century as well as three permanent collections, one of them being “Guernica”, a stunning mural-sized oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, completed in June 1937. Regarded by many art critics as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history, “Guernica” was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country village in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italian warplanes at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. As I stood face to face with this powerful work of art, I found it very difficult to walk away from it. It alone is worth the price of admission to the museum (8€, about $9.50). Nuff said.

Now, you know I never visit a museum without a camera in hand, so here are a few images I snapped during our visit to this truly remarkable art museum…