Museo Reina Sofía

Museo Reina Sofía opened in Madrid on September 10, 1992, inside a former 18th-century hospital building, and quickly became Spain's central institution for 20th-century art. Its collection centers on the country's two most influential modern painters, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso anchors the museum, a monumental response to the 1937 bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. The painting spent decades at the Museum of Modern Art in New York under Picasso's own instructions, only returning to Spain in 1981 after the country's return to democracy, and moving to the Reina Sofía after a stop at the Casón del Buen Retiro.

Beyond Guernica, the museum's holdings extend into Spanish Surrealism and later movements, giving visitors a fuller picture of how Spain's artists worked through the trauma of the civil war and the decades of dictatorship that followed.