El Greco Museum

El Greco never lived in this house. By the early 1900s the Cretan-born painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who had settled in Toledo around 1577, was half-forgotten, his elongated figures dismissed as the work of a madman. A wealthy patron, the Marquis of la Vega-Inclan, set out to fix that. He bought a group of old houses near the site of El Greco's actual lodgings and turned them into a museum-home in period style, opened in 1911, meant to conjure the world the artist worked in.

Inside you find the reason the rehabilitation stuck. The centrepiece is his 'View and Plan of Toledo', a strange bird's-eye portrait of the city he adopted, and a full series of the Apostles, Christ and the twelve, each a gaunt, flickering figure. There is a chapel, a garden, and rooms furnished as a Spanish Golden Age house.

The recreation worked so well that many visitors still leave believing they have stood in El Greco's own studio, a few streets from where he is buried in the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo.