PALACIO DE LA ADUANA

At the foot of the Alcazaba, this Palacio de la Aduana (Customs Palace), planned in 1788 and completed in 1826, is a neo-classical building built in the style of Italian Renaissance palaces, with four bays around a central patio surrounded by porticoes. Formerly the headquarters of the Royal Tobacco Factory and a sub-delegation of the provincial government, since the end of December 2015 it has housed the last major pinacotheque to open in Malaga, following a renovation of the premises via a 40 million euro state investment. Its 18,000^m2 now house the collections of two Malaga institutions, the Fine Arts Museum and the Provincial Archaeology Museum. As such, it becomes one of the top 15 museums in Spain and the most important in Andalusia. In terms of painting, the museum boasts a vast collection of 2,000 works from the 19th^and 20th^centuries , including one of the finest collections of ^19th-century Spanish painting, with works by Sorolla, Carlos de Haes, Federico Madrazo, Esquivel, Vicente López Portaña and Ramón Casas. There are also a number of paintings by the so-called Malaga School, including the most famous members: Moreno Carbonero, Enrique Simonet, Muñoz Degrain, José Nogales and Bernardo Ferrándiz. There is also a collection of modern Spanish art up to the 1950s, with works by Rafael Canogar, Juan Barjola, Óscar Domínguez and Josep Guinovart.

In terms of archaeological holdings, the museum has over 15,000 pieces spanning the period from the 8th^century BC to the medieval period, including many pieces from excavations carried out by the University of Malaga in recent years. Two particularly impressive pieces are the tomb of a warrior, dated to the 6th^century BC and found intact in the city's historic center in 2012, and a mosaic depicting the birth of Venus, found in the municipality of Cártama in the 1950s.