Museo Nacional de Arte, National art museum in La Paz, Bolivia.
The Museo Nacional de Arte occupies the Palacio Díez de Medina, a three-storey stone and brick palace built in 1775 at the corner of Calle Comercio and Calle Socabaya, facing Plaza Murillo in La Paz, Bolivia. Its Socabaya entrance has a carved stone portal rising through all three levels, and a ten-arch stone loggia wraps the corner. Inside, two courtyards are framed by arcades on three sides, with a second portal whose cornucopias are filled with papayas and whose cornice carries the date 1775.
The museum opened in 1966, taking over the Palacio Diez de Medina, which was originally built in the 18th century as a private urban palace. The building had served different purposes over the years before being repurposed as the country's main space for art.
The building is also called Casa de los Condes de Arana, a title that never actually existed; the name comes from the Arana family, who possibly occupied the palace in the mid-19th century. The museum's core collection grew from the Pinacoteca Nacional Pérez de Holguín, created in 1956 on the initiative of indigenist painter Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas, and was enlarged by a 1958 bequest of Latin American works from critic José Gómez-Sicre.
The museum occupies the Palacio Díez de Medina at the corner of Calle Comercio and Calle Socabaya, facing Plaza Murillo; the main entrance is on Socabaya. The 1961–1966 renovation by José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert placed temporary exhibitions on the ground floor and the permanent collection on the upper floors. In 2010 the adjacent Villa París added six more exhibition rooms.
The Palacio Diez de Medina is one of very few colonial urban palaces in La Paz that has survived largely intact to the present day. Its stone facade is carved with decorations that mix local motifs with European colonial forms, a detail many visitors notice only on a second look.
The community of curious travelers
AroundUs brings together thousands of curated places, local tips, and hidden gems, enriched daily by 92,848 contributors worldwide.