Social Program

The Prado Museum is certainly the most important Spanish Museum. Coming to Madrid and not visiting it is unthinkable, and we so you can count on the PSST-2000 organizing Committee taking you there. Click here for more information and a virtual tour around the building.

The Museum, which was created as a Museum of Paintings and Sculptures, also has important collections of drawings (more than five thousand), etchings (two thousand), coins and medals (close to one thousand) and almost two thousand pieces of sumptuary and decorative art. Sculpture in itself is represented by more than seven hundred pieces and by a slightly smaller number of sculptural fragments.

However, the collection of paintings in its enourmous richness in quantity (eight thousand six hundred paintings) and quality, has over-shadowed the importance of the other collections. Even so, due to the eternal lack of space, the Prado can only exhibit a most exclusive selection of its paintings (approximately a seventh of the total) and sculptures in its two sites; and even these latter are exhibited with certain decorative criteria as are some of the other furniture pieces and sumptuary art (except for the complete exhibition as an organised set of the Dauphin's Treasure).

THE VILLANUEVA BUILDING contains the most important part of the museum. This building offers the museum's painting collection from the 12th century up to Goya. Regarding sculpture, on display are Greco-Roman pieces up to the 18th-century. The Dauphin's Treasure is on display in the "planta sótano", or lower level. The paintings exhibited on the museum's street level are from the Spanish schools, from the 12th to the 16th centuries (and also the Black Paintings by Goya), and the Flemish, German and Dutch schools. On the Main Floor you will find the rest of the paintings in question -from El Greco to Goya- that make up the Spanish, Italian and French collections. There are also several sculptures on display in the various halls.

THE CASÓN DEL BUEN RETIRO and the neighboring Army Museum are the only architectural vestiges remaining of the Buen Retiro Palace, built for Philip IV in the 17th century. A sizable part of the gardens that surrounded the palace is now the Buen Retiro Park. At the Casón /which literally means "big house" but was coined for the building in the last century as a tongue-in-check allusion to its ruinous state), the Prado Museum exhibits its 19th and early 20th centuries painting collections, along with part of its sculpture collection from the same period.

Simply strolling along its narrow streets is one of the best ways to appreciate Toledo. By doing so one can capture its mood, as the city's architecture reflects the many influences and cultures present throughout its long history. Toledo once provided a rare example of Christians, Muslims and Jews living side by side, but once the Moors had been ousted it became a center of Catholic Spain's intolerance. The large Jewish population was first forced to convert to Catholicism, and later expelled outright.

Among the numerous sites worth visiting is the Cathedral, with its exquisite choir stalls and musems with paintings by El Greco, Caravaggio and Bellini among others. Nor should one miss the Iglesia de Santo Tomé, with El Greco’s famous and beautiful "Burial of the Count of Orgaz" (shown to the left). Also of interest are the "Casa y Museo de El Greco" (El Greco's house and museum), the "Museo de Santa Cruz" (Santa Cruz museum), and the the only two remaining synagogues in the old Jewish quarter, the "Sinagoga del Tránsito" (Synagogue of the Tránsito) and the "Sinagoga de Santa María la Blanca" (Synagogue of the Mary the white).