Having become the most important cultural institution in Spain and one of the most outstanding art galleries worldwide, the Prado Museum possesses a collection of around 8000 paintings, of which 1700 are on display in the Villanueva building, while more than 3200 are distributed among 255 cultural institutions throughout Spain. Each year, almost three million visitors –more than half of whom are foreigners– pass through its halls. These same halls have served as inspiration to some of the most important painters of the last 150 years, such as Fortuny, Sorolla, Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Durant and Chase.

The Prado is known more as a museum of painters than as a museum of paintings because of the uniqueness of its origins, dependent on royal patronage in the 16th and 17th centuries aimed at gathering as many works as possible from favoured artists. For this reason, the museum has the largest collections of Bosch, Titian, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez and Goya, in some cases reaching a figure of more than a hundred works. The Bourbon dynasty saw the arrival of the French painters, in an 18th century that was dominated by foreign artists, such as the Italians, until the end of the century, when Goya re-established the pre-eminence of a Spanish artist in court circles.

The current museum is made up of several buildings –the Villanueva building, the Claustro de los Jerónimos, the Casón del Buen Retiro, the administrative building on Calle Ruiz de Alarcón and the Salón de Reinos del Palacio del Buen Retiro– which together exceed 45 000 square metres of floorspace. As a public body, it is regulated by a specific law and is governed by a Board of Trustees chaired by the corresponding Minister of Culture and whose honorary presidents are Their Majesties The King and Queen of Spain.