Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

What it is

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando is a working academy on Calle de Alcalá that happens to keep one of the best picture collections in Spain on its upper floors. Founded in 1752 under Ferdinand VI, it is described by its own ticket office as the Spanish cultural institution with the longest continuous history, and it still elects academicians, runs the Calcografía Nacional and casts plaster from its own moulds. The building came second. In 1773 the Academy bought a palace on Alcalá built in 1720 by José Benito de Churriguera for the financier Juan de Goyeneche; the architect Diego de Villanueva then stripped the Baroque ornament from the front and gave it a Doric doorway and a neoclassical face, which is why the exterior reads plainer than its date suggests. The Latin inscription on the main balcony records that Charles III brought Nature and Art together under one roof in 1774, because the royal natural history cabinet shared the house until the end of the nineteenth century. The museum as a visitor meets it is recent: the galleries were fitted out between 1974 and 1983, opened officially in 1986 in thirty-five rooms on two floors, and grew in 2002 with twenty-four more rooms on the third floor. Fifty-nine rooms over three floors is the museum's own count today.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

Thirteen paintings by Goya are the reason most visitors climb the stairs, and the Academy hangs them in the main salon of the noble floor rather than in a side gallery: two self-portraits, the bullfight, the portraits of Moratín, of the architect Juan de Villanueva and of the actress known as La Tirana, and the carnival scene called The Burial of the Sardine. Around them is a collection built from Jesuit confiscations of 1769, royal gifts, and Manuel Godoy's seized collection, which arrived in 1815. Zurbarán's Agnus Dei and his Mercedarian friars, a Ribera Magdalene signed in 1636, the only Arcimboldo held in Spain, Pereda's Knight's Dream, Rubens's Susanna and the Elders, Mengs's Marquesa de Llano and Van Loo's Venus, Mercury and Love of 1748 are all permanent. Sculpture runs from Pereira's Saint Bruno and Pedro de Mena's Dolorosa to a Picasso head and a Gargallo. Downstairs, the Gabinete Francisco de Goya, rebuilt in March 2024, shows Goya's own copper etching plates rather than prints: eighty-two Disasters of War, eighteen Disparates and the eighty Caprichos. The house's own figures for the whole holding disagree between pages — the museum history page says more than 1,400 paintings and 15,000 drawings, the ticket shop says more than 1,500 paintings and 18,000 drawings — and both are printed here rather than averaged.

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How long to spend

Ninety minutes is the honest planning figure. The Academy publishes no suggested duration anywhere on its site, so this is judgement rather than a quoted number, and it is built from two hard constraints. The first is the door: the permanent collection is open from 10:00 to 15:00 and no later, a five-hour window that is short by Madrid standards and that rules out the common tactic of arriving late and staying until closing. The second is the shape of the visit. The Goya copper plates in the Gabinete come at the start of the route, the painting galleries are above, and the second floor has been shut since 2 May 2026 until further notice, so there is measurably less to walk than the fifty-nine-room figure implies. An unhurried pass through the plates and the Goya salon, with time to stop at the Zurbarán, the Arcimboldo and the Rubens, fills an hour and a half without rushing. Anyone who reads labels properly, or who arrives while a temporary exhibition is running on the third floor, should budget two hours and start at 10:00 rather than at noon. Guided visits run to their own clock: the Academy's own free tours of the museum leave Tuesday to Friday at 11:00 and the Gabinete Goya tour on Thursdays at 12:00, both capped at twenty people.

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Season and crowds

The permanent collection opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 15:00, public holidays included, and closes on Mondays. There is no midday break — the museum simply shuts at three. The Academy also closes the museum entirely on 1 and 6 January, 1 and 30 May, 9 November, and 23, 24, 25 and 31 December, and for the whole month of August. That August closure is the one that catches people out, because it removes the museum from a Madrid itinerary during the month when much of the city's cultural calendar is already thin. The site adds that museum and temporary exhibition hours can change during holiday periods, so the hours page is worth rereading the week of a visit. Within the week, a weekday morning shortly after 10:00 is the calmest slot. From 13:30 to 15:00 on Tuesdays to Fridays that are not public holidays, entry to the permanent collection is free, which fills the last ninety minutes and is also the window in which group visits are not permitted at all. Three further dates are free to everyone: 18 May for International Museum Day, 12 October and 6 December. A visitor who wants quiet should avoid all four; a visitor who wants a free ticket should accept the company.

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Tickets

General admission is 10 euros and covers the museum, the Gabinete Goya and the temporary exhibitions during the ordinary 10:00 to 15:00 opening. The reduced ticket is 5 euros with accreditation and is narrower than it looks: it admits the holder to the Academy's permanent collections only, without the temporary exhibitions. It applies to visitors over 65, retired people and pensioners, students over 25, holders of an international student card, members of the Spanish federation of friends of museums, and individual members of large families under the Spanish large-family law. Free admission, again with accreditation and again limited to the permanent collections, covers under-18s, university students aged 18 to 25, people registered unemployed, museum professionals, members of ICOM, ANABAD, IAC and MAV, official tourist guides, working journalists, teaching staff, and disabled visitors together with a companion where one is necessary for the visit. Researchers holding an Archive-Library card enter free. Groups of six to twenty-five pay 5 euros a head; school groups of the same size are free. Tickets are sold through the Academy's own shop site, which lists the same six products at the same prices. Temporary exhibitions carry their own conditions, and the free categories for them are a much shorter list — academicians and staff, partner organisations, under-12s, journalists, and ICOM and IAC members.

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Getting there

The address is Alcalá 13, 28014 Madrid, on the north side of the street a short walk east of Puerta del Sol. No car is needed and the Academy publishes no parking of its own; the whole approach is on foot from a station a few hundred metres away. The Academy's own arrival map gives the transport: Metro lines 1 and 3 at Sol and line 2 at Sevilla, Cercanías suburban lines C3 and C4 at Sol, and buses 3, 5, 15, 20, 51, 52, 53 and 150, also at Sol. Sevilla is the closer of the two Metro stops and leaves a walk of a couple of minutes along Alcalá. The same map places the building in the middle of Madrid's museum axis, with the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza downhill to the east past Plaza de Cibeles and Plaza de Cánovas del Castillo, and the Reina Sofía beyond them near Glorieta de Carlos V. That geography is the practical argument for coming here first on a museum day: the Academy shuts at 15:00 while the three big museums run into the evening, so it fits the morning and hands the afternoon to the others. The doorway is easy to walk past, since the neoclassical front does not announce a museum.

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What to watch out for

Two parts of the museum are shut and neither closure has an announced end. The second floor has been closed for internal reasons since 2 May 2026 until further notice, and inside the Gabinete Goya the room holding the thirty-three Tauromaquia plates is closed while those coppers are restored. Both are stated on the Academy's own pages, and a visitor who comes specifically for either will be disappointed rather than merely inconvenienced, so it is worth checking the hours page and the Gabinete page before buying. The five-hour opening window is the other trap. Last entry is not published separately, but arriving at 14:30 buys half an hour, and the Academy warns that hours can shift in holiday periods. Group visitors have more rules to respect: the maximum is twenty-five people for the museum and fifteen for a temporary exhibition, the group must arrive fifteen minutes before its slot and entry is not guaranteed after ten minutes' delay, and no group may enter during the free 13:30 to 15:00 window. The volunteer-led guided tours are not offered after 13:30, at weekends, or between 22 July and 15 September. Finally, the Academy's offices, archive-library, cast workshop and Calcografía enquiry desk keep weekday hours of 9:00 to 14:00, which do not overlap with a Sunday visit at all.

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Photography

The Academy publishes no visitor photography rule on its site, so whether a phone may be used in the galleries is a question for the desk on arrival rather than something to assume; what it does publish is a reproduction tariff, which is a different matter — a high-resolution digital photograph costs 20 euros, interior reproduction rights 50 euros in colour and 25 in black and white, and any published image must carry the credit line naming the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando or the Calcografía Nacional. Works by living artists are handled through VEGAP. For a visitor the useful point is that the building itself is the more photogenic subject and carries no such questions from the street: Villanueva's Doric doorway and the Latin inscription across the main balcony read best from the far pavement of Alcalá in the late afternoon, when the sun has come round to the front and the museum has already closed. Inside, the galleries are lit for conservation and the Gabinete Goya deliberately so — the lighting there was designed to rake across the engraved copper and bring the cuts up, which is beautiful to look at and unkind to a handheld camera. Anyone who wants detailed images of the paintings can get them legitimately through the Academy's free Second Canvas app, which carries high-resolution scans of a selected group of works.

Checked 2026-08-26

Where it is

Nearby

External links