Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla

After Spain closed many of its convents in the 1830s, the paintings that had hung in Seville's religious houses were brought together in one of them, the old Convento de la Merced, a Baroque cloister with tiled courtyards. The Museo de Bellas Artes opened there in 1841 and has stayed.

It is often called the finest gallery of Spanish painting after the Prado, and it is above all a museum of Seville's own golden age. Here are Murillo, the city's tender painter of Virgins and street children, the stern monks of Zurbarán, and the unsettling religious visions of Valdés Leal. Because so much of the collection came from local convents, the pictures now hang near where they were made and first seen.

The heart of the visit is the former convent church, its walls lined floor to ceiling with Murillo, under a painted and gilded ceiling.