Museo del Prado

On 16 November 1936, bombs fell on the roof and around the long building with the colonnade beside you, blowing out windows and damaging an Italian relief, and at that moment Spain's most important paintings were still hanging inside.

The evacuation had begun eleven days earlier, and between November 1936 and February 1938 twenty-two convoys carried more than four hundred paintings and a hundred and eighty drawings to Valencia, where they were kept in the Torres de Serranos, before ending up in Geneva by way of Catalonia at the end of the war. Las Meninas left with the first convoy, out of the city under cover of night. What stayed behind in Madrid is something we come to on our walk through the civil war.

The building itself was never meant to be a museum, because Juan de Villanueva designed it around 1785 for Charles III as a cabinet of physics, the third piece alongside the botanical garden next door and the observatory a little further on. The decision to hang paintings here came only after the war against Napoleon.

We follow the facade south, until we reach the gate of the botanical garden.