Visit: Museo Lázaro Galdiano

Situated on the calle Serrano, just north of some of the boutique shopping streets in Madrid, the Museo Lázaro Galdiano stands proudly amid the early twentieth-century apartment blocks and offices of the district, some of the busiest Madrid thoroughfares passing close by. A house, large enough to warrant being called a mansion, built in the first decade of the 1900s in a neo-Romantic style, with a gravel driveway to the entrance, flanked by shrubs and lawns, denotes a peaceful oasis amid the pandemonium of the capital city that surrounds it. This is a place of refuge and calm. Only a small notice near the imposing gates indicates the treasures that lie within this building. Once inside, the visitor is confronted with an interior even more richly decorated and sumptuous than the exterior: walls laden with paintings; endless cabinets of coins, medals, jewels and glassware, amongst other items; beautifully constructed doorframes, coving, panelling, marblework; painted ceilings depicting the mythological. Only Sala I, the first encountered, provides us with a clue as to the provenance and wherefore of this veritable treasure trove: José Lázaro Galdiano.

The Museo Lázaro Galdiano is a paradigm of the private collector's work that has become a museum. Lázaro Galdiano, born in Navarre in 1862, established himself in Madrid at the age of twenty-six, and shortly afterwards founded his most well-known intellectual journal, La España Moderna, which ran for twenty-five years until 1914.