The story
Before it held altarpieces, this house beside Sigüenza cathedral had been many things. For nearly 400 years it was the home of the Gamboa family, and after that a hotel, a block of flats and a bank branch. In 1956 the bishop of Sigüenza bought it for a museum, and it opened on 11 May 1968.
The collection had started almost twenty years earlier. From 1949 Bishop Laureano Castán Lacoma gathered objects from parish churches across the diocese, where many had no proper protection, and kept them in the cathedral until the house was ready. So the rooms read as a survey of the diocese's churches, with altarpieces, sculpture, silverwork, textiles and paintings running from the 12th century to the 20th.
Two pictures draw most visitors. One is an Annunciation from El Greco's last years in Toledo, which he probably painted with his son Jorge Manuel. The other is an Immaculate Conception by Francisco de Zurbarán from about 1630, showing Mary as a young girl at prayer, in a white tunic and deep blue cloak, a type Zurbarán took from the painters of Seville.
