San Diego Museum of Art

San Diego's art museum grew out of a world's fair. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915 filled Balboa Park with fantasy Spanish-colonial buildings to celebrate the new Panama Canal, and the crowds who came for the art convinced the city it needed a permanent gallery. It opened in 1926.

The architect leaned into the fair's Spanish theme. The facade is carved in the ornate Plateresque style of 16th-century Spain, and set into it are full-length figures of three Spanish painters, Velazquez, Murillo and Zurbaran, a promise about what waited inside.

The promise held. The building's strength is Spanish painting, one of the better such collections in the United States, with work by all three of the men on its front wall. Beyond that the galleries reach across 5,000 years and several continents, including a deep collection of Indian and Persian miniature painting.