MNAC (Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya)

This is MNAC, Barcelona's big daddy of art, filled with the finest works of art from all around Catalonia, from the earliest 10th-century Byzanto-Romanesque murals in the remote Pyrenees to the 20th century.

All these treasures are housed in the enormous, pompous and strange five-towered Palau Nacional, a relic of the 1929 International Exhibition that has become such a feature of the cityscape that no one really looks at it twice, which is probably just as well (although it does make a rather fetching backdrop to the merry antics of the Font Mágica).

The central cupola over the central dome room was painted by artists Manuel Humbert, Josep de Togores and Francesc Galí. The dome represents Religion, Science, the Fine Arts and the Earth. The eight paintings in the drum represent the ‘eight generations’: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Iberians, the Celts, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Visigoths, and the Muslims.