Museo de Málaga

The Museo de Málaga was created in 1973 and did not open until 2016. For most of those forty-three years it existed on paper while its two collections were homeless: the fine art was evicted from its palace in 1997 to make room for the Picasso museum that took over the Palacio de Buenavista, and the archaeology went into storage in 1996 and stayed there.

Two museums, one roof, four decades late

The Provincial Museum of Fine Arts dates to the 1910s, the Provincial Archaeological Museum to the 1940s — the latter originally housed inside the Alcazaba itself. The decision to merge them into a single Museo de Málaga came in the early 1970s. Finding it a building took very much longer. When it finally opened in the Palacio de la Aduana in December 2016, it became the largest museum in Andalusia and, by most counts, the fifth largest in Spain: roughly 18,000 square metres, eight rooms, five given to archaeology and three to fine art.

The Aduana itself

The Palacio de la Aduana is a neoclassical customs house built between 1788 and 1826, which over its life also served as a tobacco factory and as provincial government offices. Its restored courtyard is freely accessible — orange and palm trees, a fountain, panels on the building’s history — and the second-century Roman statue known as the Dama de la Aduana stands at the entrance. The museum’s upper viewpoint looks straight across at the Alcazaba, Gibralfaro and the Roman theatre, which is the clearest single vantage point on Málaga’s layered past that the city offers.

What the collections hold

The archaeology runs from prehistory through Phoenician ceramics and glass of the seventh century BC, Roman mosaics and sculpture, Moorish pottery from the Alcazaba period, and medieval Christian material — much of it recovered from University of Málaga excavations and rescue digs in the city centre. The fine art covers the fifteenth century to the twentieth: Murillo, Alonso Cano, Zurbarán, Goya, and an unusually deep run of nineteenth-century Spanish painting including Sorolla and Ramon Casas, alongside the Málaga School — Moreno Carbonero, Muñoz Degrain, Bernardo Ferrándiz. Enrique Simonet’s Anatomía del corazón is the picture most visitors come out talking about.

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