Museum of Santa Cruz

The building was meant to heal people. In the early 1500s a foundation set up by Cardinal Mendoza raised a great hospital in Toledo in the shape of a cross, its doorway and staircase carved in the ornate Plateresque style by Alonso de Covarrubias, so dense with relief it looks like silverwork turned to stone. It stopped being a hospital long ago and is now the Museo de Santa Cruz.

Its heart is a room of El Greco. About a dozen of his paintings hang here, the finest being the Assumption of the Virgin, one of the last things he painted in Toledo before his death in 1614, with the Virgin lifted on a bank of cloud among his stretched, flickering figures. The rest of the museum spreads local archaeology, ceramics and tapestries through the old wards and the cloistered courtyard, so you take in the Renaissance building itself as much as what it holds.