The Picasso
Museum
The most influential artist of the modern age was born a few hundred metres from here. Today his work hangs in a Renaissance palace in the heart of the city that shaped his eye.
Picasso came home to Málaga
Pablo Picasso left Málaga at the age of ten and never returned. But he never forgot it.
He spoke of the city for the rest of his life, and in the 1950s he wrote to a friend that he would like to see his work hang in the town of his birth. It took half a century, but in October 2003 the Museo Picasso Málaga opened in a Renaissance palace a few hundred metres from the house where he was born.
The collection is a family gift. It is built on works donated and placed on loan by the artist's daughter-in-law Christine Ruiz-Picasso and his grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso — pieces the family had kept for decades.
This gives the museum a character all of its own. These are not the famous, endlessly reproduced masterpieces of Paris and Madrid. They are the works a family chose to keep close: early studies, portraits of wives and children, ceramics, prints and sculpture from every phase of a life that spanned almost eighty working years.
You do not walk through a timeline of masterpieces. You walk through an artist's studio.
A wish that took fifty years
Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881 on the Plaza de la Merced. His father was a painter and drawing teacher, and the boy grew up with the smell of turpentine in the flat. When the family moved to A Coruña in 1891 he left the city for good — the Spanish Civil War and Franco's rule later made returning impossible for him.
Even so, the thought of Málaga kept resurfacing. In 1953 he wrote to his friend Juan Temboury, the province's delegate for fine arts, that he wanted his work represented in the town of his birth. Temboury tried to establish a museum, but the project foundered.
The thread was picked up again only in the 1990s, this time by the family itself. After years of negotiation and a thorough conversion of the Palacio de Buenavista, the museum opened on 27 October 2003 — a date still marked every year with free admission for all.
Beneath the floor lay the city. During the conversion the archaeologists found something nobody had expected: remains of Phoenician city walls from the 7th–6th century BC, Roman salting vats for making fish sauce, and foundations from Moorish and Renaissance Málaga. Rather than pour concrete over them, the excavation was preserved and made part of the museum.
A house with five hundred years behind it
The Palacio de Buenavista was built in the mid-16th century, shortly after Málaga passed from Moorish to Christian rule. You can read that in the building: a Renaissance façade and a colonnaded courtyard, but with Mudéjar ceilings of carved wood, laid by craftsmen still working in the Islamic tradition.
The courtyard is the heart of the museum. From here the galleries spread over two floors around an open square where the light falls differently with every hour of the day. The modern additions were deliberately kept quiet — white, cool and without gestures — so that the old house and the works on display are the ones doing the talking.
The garden. Behind the museum lies a small garden of laurel, geraniums, orange trees and bougainvillea, screened from the noise of the city. There is a fountain, a café with a Mediterranean menu, and the bells of the neighbouring church of San Agustín. It is one of the best places in historic Málaga to sit down in the middle of a hot afternoon — and you do not need a ticket to use it.
The collection in outline
The collection spans almost eighty working years and every technique Picasso used. The displays change, so exactly what hangs where depends on when you come.
Picasso's Málaga — the whole quarter
The strongest thing about the museum is that it does not stand alone. Within a ten-minute walk lies the whole quarter Picasso was born into.
His birthplace on the Plaza de la Merced is a small museum in its own right. The cathedral is round the corner, the Roman theatre and the Moorish Alcazaba a couple of streets away. You can spend a morning on the collection and an afternoon walking the same streets a boy walked in the 1880s — and only then does it become clear why bullfights, doves and Mediterranean light never left his work.
Everything to know before you go
The museum sits in the middle of the old town, which is closed to traffic. Park in one of the public car parks and walk the last few minutes — it is by far the easiest way to arrive.
Under an hour from the estate
Castillo del Alma sits in Mollina, in the middle of the Antequera basin. The drive to Málaga runs down the motorway past Antequera and takes just under an hour.
Before you go
Make Málaga part of your stay
A stay at Castillo del Alma is about experiencing Andalusia with all your senses. A day in Picasso's Málaga — the museum in the morning, lunch in the old town and the drive home over the mountains in the afternoon light — is one of the days guests remember.
See the estate