Reina Sofía Museum

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, on Calle de Santa Isabel in the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid, is Spain's national museum of 20th and 21st-century art and one of the world's foremost collections of modern and contemporary work. The museum occupies two interconnected buildings: the 18th-century former Hospital General de Madrid, with its striking glass lift towers added in 1992 by Ian Ritchie, and the 2005 Nouvel Building extension designed by Jean Nouvel — a metallic red-and-silver structure with a canopied roof that houses temporary exhibitions and an auditorium. The permanent collection is arranged thematically across multiple floors and is centred on the Spanish avant-garde and its international context. The undisputed centrepiece is Guernica, Pablo Picasso's enormous monochrome oil painting (3.49 by 7.76 metres) depicting the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The room dedicated to it includes preparatory sketches and documents, and is typically the most visited and most photographed space in the museum. Other key works include Joan Miró's large-format paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, Salvador Dalí's The Great Masturbator and The Enigma of Hitler, and significant holdings of German Expressionism and Surrealism in international context. The collection extends to contemporary Spanish artists and global figures through the post-Franco decades. The museum's bookshop and café are in the Nouvel Building ground floor. A sculpture garden is accessible between the two buildings.