The story
Walk into the former church of San Telmo in San Sebastián and its walls are covered by eleven huge canvases, painted in sepia tones over gold and silver leaf. The Catalan painter Josep Maria Sert made them for the museum's opening in this building in 1932, telling heroic episodes from the history of Gipuzkoa, the Basque province around the city. On the opening night the composer Manuel de Falla conducted a concert here.
The building began as a Dominican convent, built between 1544 and 1562 at the foot of Mount Urgull, with its cloister unusually placed at the head of the church nave. After the friars left in the 19th century it served as an artillery barracks, until the city museum, founded in 1902, moved in.
Today San Telmo is primarily the Museum of Basque Society, with displays on daily life, the sea and Basque identity, and it also keeps a fine-art collection. Among its paintings are works by El Greco, including a Saint Francis receiving the stigmata and a figure of the Saviour, alongside pictures by the Basque painter Ignacio Zuloaga and the Valencian Joaquín Sorolla. Since the museum reopened in 2011, a new wing by the Madrid architects Nieto Sobejano has stood against the hillside, its aluminium panels pierced with holes where plants take root.
