Museo Lázaro Galdiano: Parque Florido
Why is it significant?
Look through the railings at the villa in its garden, cream-coloured, Italianate, with a grand entrance and a lawn shaded by trees. It looks like a small private paradise dropped onto busy Calle de Serrano. That is exactly what it was, and its name was Parque Florido.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo Lázaro Galdiano: Parque Florido |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Serrano 122, 28006 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.43700, -3.68580 |
| Part of Walk | The Marquis Who Built a City: Madrid's Salamanca District & the Castellana |
| Generated | Generated |
Look through the railings at the villa in its garden, cream-coloured, Italianate, with a grand entrance and a lawn shaded by trees. It looks like a small private paradise dropped onto busy Calle de Serrano. That is exactly what it was, and its name was Parque Florido.
It belonged to José Lázaro Galdiano, a lawyer turned publisher, financier and the most obsessive collector Madrid has ever known. He married Paula Florido, a wealthy Argentine widow, and named the house after her. They built it in the first decade of the twentieth century, as a home and as a jewel box for his treasures.
And what treasures. Lázaro bought paintings, ivories, enamels, jewels, weapons, fans, manuscripts and coins, more than twelve thousand objects in all. Inside hangs a small, terrifying Goya, The Witches' Sabbath, with a great goat presiding over a ring of women offering it babies. There is a Saint John the Baptist by Hieronymus Bosch, sitting in a landscape full of strange plants, and works by El Greco, Zurbarán and Murillo.
Lázaro was also a publisher with a mission. His magazine, La España Moderna, brought European writers such as Tolstoy to Spanish readers in translation. During the Civil War he lived abroad, in Paris and then New York, and kept buying. When he died in Madrid in 1947, he left the house and everything in it to the Spanish state. The museum opened in 1951.
Look up at the ceilings when you go in: he had them painted with allegories and homages to the artists he loved. It is the rare museum where you feel the collector still lives upstairs, and might come down at any moment to tell you how he outbid a rival for that little ivory. From the gate, cross Calle de Serrano, walk west along Calle de María de Molina and continue to the great roundabout on the Castellana, where an orator in bronze is waiting.