MACA Alicante: 177 free 20th-century works in the old town

You enter from Plaza de Santa María, leave the Gothic basilica behind you and climb three stone steps: you are inside the MACA. Here, in the heart of Alicante's old town, a 1685 baroque granary shares a city block with a white concrete box signed by Sancho and Madridejos in 2011. Inside there is a Picasso. There is a Dalí. There are 175 more works. And admission is free.

A 1685 granary, the oldest civil building in the city

The official sign is unambiguous: the Casa de la Asegurada is the oldest civil building preserved in Alicante. It was built in 1685 as the municipal granary, the public storehouse that regulated the price of wheat. Three floors with a practical logic: flour at ground level, offices on the first floor, grain at the top. The baroque facade with its balustrade is recognisable from the square, with pilasters and the city coat of arms.

The building never stopped working. After the 1691 French bombardment that wrecked the old Palacio del Consell, the Asegurada temporarily housed the Town Council. Then it served as an artillery park, a prison, a secondary school from 1845, a school of commerce from 1893. By the mid-twentieth century it had fallen into disuse, until in 1966 it was proposed as the home of the Municipal Archive. The works dragged on for ten years.

1977: Eusebio Sempere chooses this house for his collection

In 1976 Eusebio Sempere, the Alicante-born artist of op art and parallel-line gouaches, visited the Asegurada and said yes, here. He donated an entire collection of twentieth-century art to his hometown. The 20th-Century Art Collection opened on 5 November 1977 inside the Casa de la Asegurada and made Alicante one of the first Spanish cities with a museum dedicated to modern art.

Sempere handled every detail himself: the lighting, the wall colour, the order of the works, the frames, the brochure, the poster. He turned the installation into his own work. And he set one condition: his name would not appear in the museum's title. The collection, not him.

Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Chillida: 177 works, 114 signatures

The 20th-Century Art Collection brings together 177 pieces by 114 artists across seven decades, from the twenties to the eighties. A minimum reading of the roster: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Juan Gris, Pablo Gargallo, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Calder. Painting, sculpture, drawing, lithograph, screenprint: every technique in which the twentieth century reinvented itself.

Only 76 works are on display at a time. The museum rotates the galleries every four months and has done so since 1998, so each visit reshuffles what you see. If you come back in autumn it is not the same museum as in spring. That rotation, almost impossible in larger collections, is one of the MACA's quiet privileges: you do not measure kilometres of corridor, you find yourself face to face with a Miró without queues and without tickets booked three weeks in advance.

The Juana Francés room, the painter who co-founded El Paso

The second donation that defines the museum bears the name of Juana Francés, the Alicante painter born in 1924 and co-founder of the El Paso group in 1957, alongside Saura, Millares and Feito. Francés bequeathed her entire collection to Alicante: figurative oils from the fifties, matter painting and conceptual work from the seventies, sketches, proofs of her graphic editions. The route lets you follow the stages of her evolution, from academy to gesture.

There is also a holding of Sempere's own work that the City Council has acquired since the nineties, and a floor dedicated to temporary shows: monographs, contemporary photography, drawing, projects curated by young Spanish galleries.

The new building: Sancho and Madridejos, 2002 to 2011

In 2002 the Conselleria de Infraestructuras held a competition to expand the museum. Juan Carlos Sancho and Sol Madridejos won it, a Madrid studio with work in León, Madrid and Costa Rica. The project integrated the Casa de la Asegurada with a new white concrete volume that fills the rest of the block, four floors above ground and two basements. In total, 4,680 m² built.

The MACA reopened on 22 March 2011. That same year the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos awarded its medal to the museum and the CSCAE jury singled out the extension. In 2013 it won the Technal architecture prize for its handling of light in section, one of the most surprising things inside: the galleries open onto vertical patios that drop softened natural light onto the works.

How to visit: address, hours and the neighbours next door

The MACA sits on Plaza Santa María 3, opposite the basilica of the same name, beside the Santa Cruz quarter. If you walk up from the Explanada along Calle Mayor you arrive in ten minutes. If you come down from the Santa Bárbara castle, you trip over the square at the foot of the climb.

Regular hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 11:00 to 20:00 non-stop and Sunday and public holidays from 10:00 to 14:00. Mondays it closes. In summer, from 1 July to 30 September, Tuesday to Friday it opens at 10:00. Admission is free. There is a free guided visit, by booking, for groups and for the general public when there is no temporary show. The museum phone is +34 965 213 156.

The square is a good stop to round off the visit. The Mercado Central is five minutes on foot, the bars on Calle San Francisco three, and the climb to the castle starts right behind the MACA, up the slope that rises to the Benacantil. On a Saturday morning you can do the lot and still make it to lunch for rice at two.

If you can imagine living five minutes on foot from the MACA, with the old town on one side and the beach on the other, it is worth exploring our properties in central Alicante or contact us for a tailored search.