The story
Walk down from the square between Madrid's Royal Palace and the Almudena Cathedral, and you are inside a hill. The Royal Collections Gallery, opened in 2023 by Patrimonio Nacional, the state body that runs the former royal estates, is built into the slope that drops toward the Campo del Moro gardens. From the esplanade above it is almost invisible. The architects Emilio Tuñón and Luis Moreno Mansilla designed it, and the project took nearly a quarter of a century.
Digging the site uncovered a stretch of Madrid's Islamic wall, part of the 9th-century fortress the city grew around, and it now runs through the building. The galleries step down floor by floor through the Habsburg and Bourbon centuries. Among the paintings is Caravaggio's Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, a dark late canvas from around 1607.
Goya appears here in an unusually private mood. A small panel shows men making gunpowder in the Sierra de Tardienta, hills near Huesca in Aragon. An inscription on the back names a shoemaker, José Mallén, who ran a hidden powder works there for the guerrillas during the war against Napoleon, and Ferdinand VII bought the picture for the royal collection after 1814.
