Museo Arqueológico Nacional & Biblioteca Nacional
Why is it significant?
Walk along the railings until you face the long classical façade on Calle de Serrano, with its stone stairs and its row of columns. It is one building, but it has two front doors: on this side the National Archaeological Museum, on the far side, facing Recoletos, the National Library of Spain.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo Arqueológico Nacional & Biblioteca Nacional |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Serrano 13, 28001 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.42340, -3.68890 |
| Part of Walk | The Marquis Who Built a City: Madrid's Salamanca District & the Castellana |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the railings until you face the long classical façade on Calle de Serrano, with its stone stairs and its row of columns. It is one building, but it has two front doors: on this side the National Archaeological Museum, on the far side, facing Recoletos, the National Library of Spain.
Queen Isabel II laid the first stone in 1866, and the work dragged on for so long that the palace was only finished in 1892, just in time for the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus reaching America. The library inside is far older than its home. Philip V founded it in 1711 as a royal public library, and within a few years printers were obliged to send it a copy of every book they made. That rule is why the shelves inside now hold millions of items.
But the star on this side is a woman. In 1897, at La Alcudia near Elche, on the Mediterranean coast, a young farm labourer struck stone with his pick and uncovered a carved head and shoulders. She wears huge wheel-shaped coils over her ears, heavy necklaces and a serene, almost stern face. She is the Lady of Elche, Iberian, carved around the fifth or fourth century before Christ.
Within days she was sold to a French archaeologist and shipped to the Louvre. She stayed in Paris for more than forty years, until an exchange of art between Spain and France brought her home in 1941. She spent three decades in the Prado and moved to this museum in 1971. There is a hollow in her back... and many archaeologists believe she once held the ashes of the dead.
The museum reopened in 2014 after a long renovation, and the Lady now shares the galleries with Roman mosaics, Visigothic votive crowns and Moorish ivory caskets. From the museum steps, cross Calle de Serrano and head east along Calle de Goya. Two blocks on, you reach the street of a painter, and the grid that made Salamanca famous.