Picasso Museum

Five connected medieval palaces on Carrer de Montcada - one of the most beautiful streets in Barcelona - housing over 4,200 works that trace Picasso's evolution from teenage prodigy to the artist who broke art open and rebuilt it. If you're expecting Guernica, that's in Madrid. What you get here is arguably more interesting: the formative years, the Blue Period, and the Las Meninas series - Picasso's 58 obsessive reinterpretations of the Velazquez masterpiece that take up an entire room and show you how a genius thinks through a problem.

The buildings themselves are part of the experience. The five palaces date to the 13th-15th centuries, with stone courtyards, carved staircases, and medieval ceilings that most museums would charge admission for on their own. Carrer de Montcada was Barcelona's most prestigious address in the Middle Ages, and the architecture hasn't changed much - walking from palace to palace feels like moving through centuries.

The €12 entry is fair for what you get. Free admission on Thursday evenings from 4-7 PM, but the queue forms by 3 PM and the rooms get packed - worth it if you're patient and don't mind elbows. Book online any other time to skip the ticket queue; the security queue is separate and moves fast. Budget 90 minutes for the permanent collection, maybe 2 hours if the temporary exhibition on the top floor is good (they often are, and they're included in the ticket).

The collection is strongest in the early rooms - the academic drawings Picasso made as a teenager in Malaga and Barcelona are almost unsettlingly precise, and they make the later cubist work land differently because you can see he didn't break the rules from ignorance. He mastered them first, then systematically demolished them. The Science and Charity painting, done at age 15, could hang in any classical museum. Knowing what came after makes it fascinating rather than merely impressive.