On 16 November 1936, bombs fell on the roof and around the long building with the colonnade beside you, blowing out windows and damaging an Italian relief, and at that moment Spain's most important paintings were still hanging inside.
The evacuation had begun eleven days earlier, and between November 1936 and February 1938 twenty-two convoys carried more than four hundred paintings and a hundred and eighty drawings to Valencia, where they were kept in the , before ending up in Geneva by way of Catalonia at the end of the war. left with the first convoy, out of the city under cover of night. What stayed behind in Madrid is something we come to on our walk through the .
The building itself was never meant to be a museum, because designed it around 1785 for as a cabinet of physics, the third piece alongside the botanical garden next door and the observatory a little further on. The decision to hang paintings here came only after .
We follow the facade south, until we reach the gate of the botanical garden.
Sources. Story: Museo Nacional del Prado, history of the Edificio Villanueva; Arturo Colorado Castellary, El Museo del Prado y la guerra civil; Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, photo archive of the Junta de Protección del Tesoro Artístico. Photos: Photo of the Museo del Prado: Christian Van Der Henst Solis, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
