Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

What it is

The Thyssen-Bornemisza is the private-collection third of Madrid's Paseo del Arte, standing on Paseo del Prado at number 8 in the Villahermosa palace, a few minutes' walk from the Prado and the Reina Sofia. What it holds is a family collection turned national museum. Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza began assembling it around the end of the 1920s with the stated aim of gathering the principal milestones of Western art, buying work dated between the thirteenth and the early nineteenth century. From 1948 his son Hans Heinrich carried it on, deepening the Old Masters and pushing the collection forward as far as the 1980s. It was kept at Villa Favorita in Lugano until the building ran out of wall, and in the mid-1980s Hans Heinrich went looking for a new home for it. The museum opened in Madrid in October 1992, and a few months later the Spanish government agreed terms with the baron to buy the collection outright, so it has belonged to the country since 1993. The museum's own description of what is on show is almost a thousand paintings covering the history of art from the late thirteenth century to the twentieth. That is the practical point for a visitor: this is a survey collection, arranged to be walked in order, rather than a museum built around a handful of famous rooms.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The building holds three separate displays and it helps to know which is which before buying a ticket. The permanent collection, about seven hundred works, occupies the two upper floors and was reinstalled in 2021 to make the route read cleanly: the tour starts on the second floor, given over entirely to Old Masters, and continues on the first floor with the modern masters arranged in reverse order, so a visitor walks forward in time by walking down. The ground floor is the Carmen Thyssen Collection, leased to the museum by Carmen and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza for fifteen years, with its own entrance off the main hall; its display is chronological too, opening with seventeenth-century Dutch painting and closing in the twentieth century. The museum states the loan runs to 328 works, of which 298 are in the digital catalogue. Temporary exhibitions sit on the ground and first basement floors. The names the museum itself puts forward include Duccio, Van Eyck, Durer, Carpaccio, Holbein, Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Hals, Canaletto, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Morisot, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Miro, Dali, Hopper, O'Keeffe, Pollock, Lichtenstein and Bacon. One caveat the museum prints itself: it lends heavily, so works are often away, replaced or captioned with a loan notice.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Allow two hours. The museum publishes no suggested visit length anywhere on its visit pages, so two hours is this guide's judgement rather than a figure read off the museum's own site. The number comes from the shape of the display. The permanent collection is about seven hundred works over two floors on a single fixed route, and the Carmen Thyssen ground floor adds a third sequence with its own entrance. Walked steadily, without stopping for a temporary exhibition, the two upper floors take an unhurried ninety minutes; the ground floor adds thirty. A visitor who wants to sit with the Impressionist and twentieth-century rooms on the first floor, which is where most people slow down, should budget three hours. Two constraints cap the other end. On Mondays the museum is open only from 12.00 to 16.00, so four hours is the entire window that day and arriving at 15.00 is not a visit. In winter the last hours before the 19.00 close are the fullest, and being moved along by closing staff is a poor way to end. If a temporary exhibition is the reason for the trip, add an hour to whatever figure above applies and go early rather than late.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Season and crowds

The museum runs two published timetables and the difference is worth checking before travelling. From 1 September to 30 June it opens Tuesday to Friday and Sunday from 10.00 to 19.00, Saturday from 10.00 to 23.00, and Monday only from 12.00 to 16.00. From 1 July to 31 August the weekday close moves out to 21.00, Tuesday to Friday, while Saturday stays 10.00 to 23.00, Sunday stays 10.00 to 19.00 and Monday stays 12.00 to 16.00. There is no weekly closing day and no midday break: the museum is open every day of the week, with Monday simply a shorter one. Three dates are closed outright, 1 January, 1 May and 25 December, and on 24 and 31 December the museum opens 10.00 to 15.00. One distinction matters more than any of that. In summer the extended evening belongs to the temporary exhibitions; the museum states separately that its summer hours for the collection itself are Monday 12.00 to 16.00, Tuesday to Friday and Sunday 10.00 to 19.00, and Saturday 10.00 to 21.00. A visitor arriving at 20.00 on a July Wednesday for the permanent collection will find the building open and the collection shut. Saturday evening is the quiet slot: the late close runs to 23.00 all year.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

General admission is 14 euros and it covers the collections and the temporary exhibitions together. The reduced rate is 10 euros, and the museum applies it to over-65s and pensioners and to students. Groups of seven or more pay 12 euros a head. Several categories enter free: Friends of the museum, under-18s, the unemployed, and visitors with a recognised disability of 33 per cent or above. Two paid add-ons are published alongside the ticket, an audio guide at 5.50 euros on top of the ticket price and a ticket-plus-cafe-menu combination at 24.50 euros on top. The Paseo del Arte Pass is 32.80 euros and covers one visit each to the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Prado and the Reina Sofia, valid for a year from purchase, which the museum describes as a 20 per cent saving against buying the three separately. Free entry is also scheduled rather than occasional. Every Monday from 12.00 to 16.00 admission is free, sponsored by Mastercard, which is the whole of the Monday window. Every Saturday from 21.00 to 23.00 entry is free under the Thyssen Nights with Uber scheme, with access between those two hours. A third scheme lets a visitor bring one guest free on any day of the week, bought at the museum ticket office and subject to availability.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

The address is Paseo del Prado 8, 28014 Madrid, and the museum's telephone number is 917 911 370. No car is needed and none is wanted. The nearest Metro station is Banco de Espana on line 2, a short walk up the Paseo del Prado, and the museum names it as the closest. Suburban rail is close on both sides: Atocha to the south and Recoletos to the north are the two Cercanias stations the museum lists, and Recoletos in particular puts a visitor within a few minutes on foot. The bus network is dense here, and the museum publishes eighteen routes that serve the site: 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 20, 27, 34, 37, 41, 51, 52, 53, 74, 146 and 150. For a bike, the nearest BiciMAD docking station is number 29 at Marques de Cubas 25. Drivers are pointed at the Las Cortes public car park, which is the only parking the museum names, and central Madrid parking around the Paseo del Prado is expensive and slow to enter on a weekend. The practical route for most visitors is to treat the museum as one stop on a walk that also takes in the Prado and the Reina Sofia, since all three sit on the same avenue.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The Monday trap is the big one. Free entry on Monday sounds like the obvious day to come, but the museum is open only from 12.00 to 16.00 that day, and the museum also states that no luggage is accepted in the cloakroom on Mondays. A visitor arriving off a train with a suitcase on a Monday has nowhere to put it. The second trap is the summer evening described above: the building's later July and August close belongs to the temporary exhibitions, and the collection itself still stops at 19.00 on weekdays. The third is lending. The museum prints a standing notice that it contributes constantly to exhibitions elsewhere, so works from the collection are often out on loan, and their absence can mean replacements, changed installations or a loan notice on the wall where the painting was. If one specific picture is the reason for the trip, check before travelling. Smaller things: bags and small rucksacks are allowed into the galleries, but anything large or heavy is not, and plants, food and flags are refused outright. The cloakroom is free and tipping is not permitted. Las Terrazas, the outdoor cafe in the garden, opens only Thursday to Sunday. The free wifi lasts four hours per registration.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

The museum publishes no visitor photography rules that this guide could find. Its visit, services, getting-here and accessibility pages say nothing about cameras, flash, tripods or selfie sticks, and its Use of Images page covers reproduction rights and the photographic archive rather than what a visitor may do in a gallery. That means the honest advice is to ask at the information desk on arrival and to watch the room signage, not to assume either permission or prohibition. What is known points to caution in the modern rooms. The museum credits many twentieth-century works with an all-rights-reserved rights line naming the artist's estate or a collecting society, and the Carmen Thyssen paintings carry their own credit line, so restrictions are likelier on the first and ground floors than on the second. Practically, the Villahermosa palace is a difficult interior to photograph well in any case: the galleries are lit for paintings, the walls are close, and a phone will fight the glazing on the smaller panels. The building outside is the easier subject. The Paseo del Prado frontage takes late afternoon light on its west face, and the garden terrace beside the extension gives a clean angle on the facade without traffic in the frame.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Where it is

Nearby

External links

• View on Wikidata