Museo Cerralbo: A Marquis's House, Untouched

Why is it significant?

On quiet Calle de Ventura Rodríguez, stop in front of the elegant townhouse with the iron gates and the stone staircase. From outside it looks like any aristocratic house of the 1890s. Inside, time simply stopped.

Key Facts

Open the walk

On quiet Calle de Ventura Rodríguez, stop in front of the elegant townhouse with the iron gates and the stone staircase. From outside it looks like any aristocratic house of the 1890s. Inside, time simply stopped.

It belonged to Enrique de Aguilera y Gamboa, the seventeenth Marquis of Cerralbo, a man of many passions. He was a politician, a leader of the Carlist movement that supported a rival branch of the royal family. He was a pioneering archaeologist, digging at sites in Soria and Guadalajara, where he found prehistoric remains including the bones of ancient elephants. And above all, he was a collector who could not stop.

He built this palace between the 1880s and 1893 to live in with his collections. When he died in 1922 he left it to the state on one condition: that it be kept as he had arranged it. So the museum, opened in 1944, still looks like a home. Paintings hang frame to frame up to the ceiling, armour stands in the corners, porcelain fills the cabinets. There are tens of thousands of objects, and among the paintings is El Greco's Saint Francis in Ecstasy.

Save some breath for the ballroom. Mirrors, gilding, painted ceilings and crystal chandeliers, all the glitter of Madrid high society at the end of the nineteenth century. Stand there and you can almost hear the orchestra tuning up.

Many visitors fall in love with the smaller details: the bathroom with its original fittings, the desk where the Marquis wrote, the little objects he picked up on his travels. It feels less like a museum than like being shown round by a slightly eccentric uncle. From the door, walk west to the end of the street and across Calle de Ferraz into the park. The last stop is the oldest thing in Madrid by far.