Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando

Madrid's other great picture gallery sits a short walk from the Prado on the Calle de Alcala, inside the academy Spain founded in 1744 to train its painters and sculptors. For most of its life this has been a working school, and its most famous member ran it: Francisco de Goya, court painter, was the academy's director of painting in the 1790s.

The rooms hold what a teaching collection gathers over centuries. There are Goyas the crowds at the Prado never see, among them a small, unsettling picture of a madhouse and his self-portrait as an old man. Zurbaran, Murillo and El Greco hang nearby.

Two teenagers passed through its studios and left quickly. Pablo Picasso enrolled in 1897 and stopped attending within months, and Salvador Dali was expelled in the 1920s after telling his examiners that none of them was competent to judge him. The academy is still a working school, and students draw from its plaster casts in the same rooms.