Museu Picasso

Few museums show how a great artist learned his craft as closely as the Museu Picasso, which opened in 1963 as the first museum devoted to Pablo Picasso and the only major one founded during his lifetime. Its collection is strongest on his formative years. It traces his development from the academic studies of his teens in A Coruña and Barcelona through the Blue Period.

Highlights include Science and Charity, painted when Picasso was fifteen, and The First Communion. Another is the Las Meninas series of 1957, his extended response to Velázquez, which he gave to the museum himself. Later holdings include ceramics and a large body of prints.

The museum occupies five adjoining medieval palaces on Carrer de Montcada in the Ciutat Vella, and their Gothic courtyards and stone stairways are part of the experience. With more than a million visitors a year, it suits anyone curious about how Picasso became Picasso, more than those hoping to see his best-known Cubist masterpieces.