Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Travel Guide

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Tues-Sun 10am-7pm; the museum has also experimented with opening on Mondays during July & Aug, but this may not be a permanent arrangement, so check beforehand; €4.80; www.museothyssen.org ; Métro: Banco de España) occupies the old Palacio de Villahermosa, diagonally opposite the Prado, at the end of the Carrera de San Jerónimo. This prestigious site played a large part in Spain's acquisition - for a knock-down $350 million in June 1993 - of what many argue was the world's greatest private art trove after that of the British royals: 700-odd paintings accumulated by father-and-son German-Hungarian industrial magnates. Another trump card was Baron Thyssen's current (fifth) wife, "Tita" Cervera, a former Miss Spain, who steered the works to Spain against the efforts of Britain's Prince Charles, the Swiss and German governments, the Getty foundation, and other suitors.

A terribly kitsch portrait of Tita with a lapdog hangs in the great hall of the museum, alongside those of her husband and King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía. Pass beyond, however, and you are into seriously premier-league art: medieval to eighteenth-century on the top floor, seventeenth-century Dutch and Rococo and Neoclassicism to Fauves and Expressionists on the first floor, and Surrealists, Pop Art and the avant-garde on ground level. Highlights are legion in a collection that displays an almost stamp-collecting mentality in its examples of nearly every major artist and movement: how the Thyssens got hold of classic works by everyone from Duccio and Holbein, through El Greco and Caravaggio, to Schiele and Rothko, takes your breath away.

The museum had no expense spared on its design - again in the hands of the ubiquitous Rafael Moneo, responsible for the remodelling of Atocha and the current works at the Prado - with stucco walls (Tita insisted on salmon pink) and marble floors. There's a handy cafeteria and restaurant in the basement which allows re-entry, so long as you get your hand stamped at the exit desk. The basement is also home to a temporary exhibition space, which has staged a number of interesting and highly successful shows (separate entry fee of €3.60 and often with extended opening hours). There's also a shop, where you can buy the first instalments of the fifteen-volume catalogue of the baron's collection as well as the more modest, but informative, illustrated guide to the museum (€10.80). Around half of the collection is now on show, either here, or at the Monestir de Pedralbes in Barcelona, which houses around eighty works of sacred art. Plans are afoot to extend the museum into some of the nearby buildings to accommodate some of Tita's own collection.