Barcelona museums

Museu Picasso ★★ - The greatest Picasso museum outside of Paris is filled with 3,000 works by Andalusia native Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). There are plenty of those crowd-pleasing (or crowd-confusing) Cubist paintings, yes, but also many early works in an exactingly, surprisingly classical style worthy of an Old Master... but which Picasso painted while living here in Barcelona when he was still just a teenager... » more

La Pedrera (Casa Milá) ★★ - Casa Milà—often called La Pedrera ("the quarry") for its undulating rocky shape, all poured cement set with chips of bone-white cermaic tile—is a magnificent apartment block designed by Antoni Gaudí and declared a UNESCO World heritage Site in 1984. Here, especially, Gaudí seemed to avoid straight lines at all costs—the whole place looks like it's melting. There's an exhibition space on Gaudí and Modernisme inside, and you can tour an apartment and the architectural fun park and swirly chimneys of the roof.... » more

Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya ★ - In an enormous 1929 palace atop Montjuïc hill is the MNAC, one of the world’s biggest and best collections of Romanesque art, centered around a series of gorgeous 12th-century frescoes removed from Catalonian churches in the Pyrenees. The late-Medeival art is actually just the highlight. The point of this museum is to catalogue the best of Catalan art from the Romanesque all the way to the 1940s... » more

Fundació Joan Miró ★ - The world's greatest collection of art by Barcelona native Joan Miró (1893–1983) inhabits this modernist building on Montjuïc hill. The foundation owns a staggering 14,000 works by the modern master of colorful whimsical, often delightfully playful art alongside works by Miró contemporaries (Duchamp, Ernst, Calder, Léger, Moore, Oldenburg, etc.)... » more

Gaudí museums at Park Güell ★ - In and around architect Antoni Gaudí’s idiosyncratic, 37-acre park are two small museums dedicated to the artist: the Centre d’Interpretació del Park Güell, part of the Museu d'Història de Barcelona, which interprets the park itself; and the Casa-Museu Gaudí, where the master himself lived from 1906 to 1926... » more

Fundació Antoni Tàpies - The grand Barcelona painter and artist Antoni Tàpies i Puig (1923–2012) created this foundation—in an early Modernisme structure by Lluís Domènech i Montaner—to serve as a space for contemporary art exhibitons and lectures, and to preserve his own artistic legacy, housing more than 2,000 of his works... » more