Fine Arts Museum (Casa de l'Ensenyança)

What it is

The museum occupies the Casa de l'Ensenyança, in Plaza del Arzobispo Mayoral 2. It is a mid-eighteenth-century building with a Baroque doorway and the coat of arms of Archbishop Mayoral, who founded the educational institution that occupied it until the end of the twentieth century. Its conversion into a museum is, according to the tourist office, one of the city's most important cultural projects in recent decades.

The pieces you can't miss

The most famous is a portrait of Philip V, by the local painter Josep Amorós, which hangs upside down: it is the city's answer to the king who in 1707 ordered it burned and destroyed. According to the tourism website, it was a municipal curator who hung it that way in the mid-twentieth century, and so it remains.

Xàtiva is the birthplace of Josep de Ribera, El Españoleto, who worked mostly in Italy. The museum has his Saint Matthias the Apostle, on loan from the Prado, as well as a Saint Andrew and a Salvator. Of Goya it holds the complete series of the Caprichos and the Disparates, from the Carreño Gómez donation. By Vicente López there are The Last Supper and a portrait of Ferdinand VII.

Old Valencian painting is represented by the altarpiece of the Saviour or the Transfiguration, with 22 panels attributed to the Master of Borbotó, a sixteenth-century painter whose identity is unknown, and by the panel of Sant Nicolau and Sant Dionís by Nicolau Falcó, the only one left from the altarpiece of the hermitage of the Santes. There are also remains of the Gothic chapel that Pope Calixtus III had built in the old main mosque, demolished centuries later: the keystone and a corbel with an angel holding the Borgia coat of arms. That is why the museum is one of the stops on the Borgia route. The collection is completed by a late Gothic boundary cross that stood at the entrance to the city on the Valencia road, the royal portraits that hung in the Casa de la Ciudad and work by Benlliure, Rusiñol, Antoni Miró and Pérez Contel, among others.

Hours and tickets

Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays, from 10:00 to 14:30. Closed on Mondays. Phone 962 28 24 55. The ticket for the municipal museums costs €4 and also includes the Almodí Museum; the reduced rate, €2, is for young people aged 8 to 16, students, pensioners, large families, groups of ten or more and people with disabilities, and it is free up to age 7. Buying online is recommended, and tickets are non-exchangeable and non-refundable. Admission to the castle includes the municipal museums; ask at the ticket desk whether yours covers this one. Allow an hour.

How to combine it

Plaza del Arzobispo Mayoral is in the old town, about 400 metres' walk from the Collegiate Church. As it closes at 14:30, it fits in the morning: La Seu, the museum, lunch in the old town and the castle in the afternoon.