Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada

This guide to the Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada traces the odd history of the palace that houses it: an unfinished Renaissance courtyard that Emperor Charles V commissioned from architect Pedro Machuca in 1527, then left roofless for three centuries after money ran out and Napoleon's soldiers stripped its wood for scrap. It follows the palace through neglect, plunder and a slow twentieth-century restoration that didn't finish the roof until 1967. Along the way it turns to the confiscation of Granada's monastery art in the 1830s, which is how the palace first gained anything to display.