Museo Reina Sofía

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is Spain's national museum of modern and contemporary art, and the third point of Madrid's Golden Triangle of museums with the Prado and the Thyssen. It occupies a vast eighteenth century hospital designed by Francesco Sabatini, with thick stone walls, long vaulted corridors and a cool inner courtyard, to which the architect Jean Nouvel added a dramatic red roofed extension in 2005. The collection runs from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, and the museum is organised as a series of chronological chapters rather than by artist, so that painting, sculpture, photography, film and posters are mixed together.

Most visitors come for one painting: Picasso's Guernica, which has hung here since 1992 in a gallery surrounded by the studies he made for it. But the museum is also the place to see Spain's other great modern masters, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Juan Gris, and to follow the story of Spanish art through the Civil War, the Franco years and the return of democracy. The contemporary floors and the Nouvel building carry the story to today.

The building is large and easy to get lost in. The Sabatini building has four floors around the courtyard; the collection begins on the second floor, and the famous glass lift towers on the facade are the quickest way up.