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🎨 Culture

Zaragoza for Culture Lovers — 3 Days of Goya Prints, Mudéjar Brick and Steel Sculpture

Four Goya engraving series, a UNESCO Mudéjar tower, Gargallo's cut-metal heads and the Asalto mural barrio, walked end to end.

📍 Zaragoza, Spain 📅 3-day itinerary

Zaragoza holds the largest concentration of Goya's graphic work anywhere, a UNESCO-listed Mudéjar brick tradition unique to Aragon, and a contemporary scene running from Carme Pinós architecture to September mural festivals in the San Pablo barrio.

Visual Arts & Architecture

09:00
🖼️ Museo Goya – Colección Ibercaja

Fourteen rooms inside a 16th-century Renaissance palace on Calle Espoz y Mina hold all four of Goya's engraved series, including the 80 plates of Los Caprichos, alongside Aragonese painting from the 15th century onward.

⏱ 2-3 hours 💶 €6 (€4 reduced, students free)
The Caprichos hang in a low-lit room on the upper floor — start there, before coach groups reach the building around 11:00.
12:00
🗿 Museo Pablo Gargallo

The Palacio de Argillo, a 1659 Aragonese mansion on Plaza San Felipe, shows over 100 works by the sculptor who cut portrait heads from flat sheet metal, among them El Profeta and Gran Bailarina.

⏱ 1.5 hours 💶 Free
The rear annexe displays Gargallo's cardboard templates and tools — most visitors turn back at the courtyard and never see it.
14:30
🏛️ IAACC Pablo Serrano

Aragon's contemporary art institute wrapped the sculptor's former studio on Paseo María Agustín in a perforated steel skin in 2011. Inside: 140 Pablo Serrano bronzes plus rotating Spanish video, photography and installation shows.

⏱ 2 hours 💶 Free
17:00
🕌 Iglesia de San Pablo

Called the third cathedral of Zaragoza, this UNESCO-listed Mudéjar church raises an octagonal brick minaret-tower over a 14th-century nave, sheltering the retablo mayor that Damián Forment carved between 1511 and 1517.

⏱ 1.5 hours
Visits are guided and afternoon-only; the sacristan opens the retablo's painted side panels on request, which the standard circuit skips.

Performing Arts & Museums

10:00
🏺 Museo de Zaragoza

The neo-Renaissance pavilion raised on Plaza de los Sitios for the 1908 Hispano-French Exposition runs from Iberian bronzes and Caesaraugusta floor mosaics to an upstairs room of Goya canvases including Ferdinand VII.

⏱ 2 hours 💶 Free
The Goya room sits at the top of the right-hand staircase; the ground-floor archaeology loop swallows an hour if you start there.
13:00
Patio de la Infanta

A 1550 Renaissance courtyard, dismantled and shipped to Paris in the 19th century, then bought back and rebuilt inside Ibercaja's headquarters on Calle San Ignacio de Loyola, its columns carved with mythological reliefs.

⏱ 1 hour
15:00
🎨 CaixaForum Zaragoza

Carme Pinós cantilevered two dark volumes above an open plaza near Delicias station in 2014. Two galleries take travelling exhibitions from the Prado, the Louvre and MoMA, with a 264-seat auditorium below.

⏱ 2 hours 💶 €6 (free for CaixaBank cardholders)
18:00
🎭 Teatro Principal de Zaragoza

Working since 1799 on Calle Coso, the horseshoe auditorium seats roughly 1,300 under a painted ceiling and programmes opera, zarzuela and Spanish-language drama across a September-to-June season.

Unsold seats go at reduced price from the Coso box office about an hour before curtain — cash and card, no booking fee.

Local Culture & Neighbourhood Life

09:30
🏟️ Museo del Teatro de Caesaraugusta

A glass canopy roofs the excavated Roman theatre found in 1972 under a demolished block on Calle San Jorge. Walkways cross the 6,000-seat cavea while the museum reconstructs its 1st-century AD stage machinery.

⏱ 2 hours 💶 €4, or €7 for all four Caesaraugusta museums
The combined ticket also covers the forum, river port and baths sites, all within a ten-minute walk of this one.
12:30
🥘 Mercado Central de Lanuza

Félix Navarro's 1903 iron-and-glass hall on Avenida César Augusto reopened in 2020 after a full restoration, with around 70 stalls selling ternasco lamb, Ebro-valley borage and Cariñena and Campo de Borja wines.

⏱ 1.5 hours
14:30
📜 Centro de Historia & EMOZ Origami Museum

The converted San Agustín convent on Plaza San Agustín pairs the municipal history centre with EMOZ, the first museum anywhere devoted to origami, rotating around 100 folded pieces by Japanese and Spanish masters.

⏱ 2 hours 💶 €3 for EMOZ; history centre free
17:30
🎪 El Gancho murals (Barrio San Pablo)

Zaragoza's oldest working-class quarter, known locally as El Gancho, keeps the large-format murals left by the Asalto urban art festival every September, concentrated along Calles Las Armas, Aguadores and San Blas.

The Asalto website publishes a free downloadable map of every surviving mural by year — load it before you lose signal in the narrow streets.

📍 Route map

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