Antoni Gaudí was the most famous Spanish architect as well as one of the most unusual architects of the early 20th century. Through aneclectic approach, he created a unique style reminiscent of theMudéjar, an architectural style blending Muslim and Christian design. Despite Gaudí’s posthumous prominence, during his life he had no influence outside of Spain and little influence within it. Most of Gaudí’s work was done inBarcelona. His most famous building is the unfinishedExpiatory Temple of the Holy Family. Spain’s leading architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—some of whom attained international renown—includedJosep Lluís Sert,Eduardo Torroja, Sanz de Oiza, Ricardo Bofill, JoséRafael Moneo, andSantiago Calatrava.

Cinema

Spain’s film industry has always been small and economically fragile. A large number of the films shown in Spanish cinemas in the 21st century were imported, from other European countries and, above all, from theUnited States.

The Spanish film directorLuis Buñuel is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Because he was inexile during the Franco regime, most of his films were made outside of Spain, first inMexico and then inFrance.

The cinema suffered greatly from the censorship of the Franco regime, and it began to recover only at the end of the 1950s with the work of Juan Antonio Bardem andLuis García Berlanga. After 1970 a number of Spanish directors, such asCarlos Saura, Pilar Miró, Victor Erice, andPedro Almodóvar, achieved critical success both in Spain and abroad. José Luis Garcí’sBegin the Beguine (1982) won theAcademy Award for best foreign-language film, as did Fernando Trueba’sBelle Epoque (1992). However, Spanish films were not generally economically successful abroad, the one major exception being Almodóvar’s comedies, especiallyWomen on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown(1988),Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), andAll About My Mother (1999), the last of which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film. By the late 1990s a new generation of directors, benefiting from government tax incentives and increased exposure on the internationalfilm festival circuit, had begun to attract attention outside Spain. In the first years of the 21st century, intellectually ambitious ghost stories such asAlejandro Amenábar’sThe Others (2001) emerged as agenre that easily found audiences outside thecountry. Amenábar’sThe Sea Inside (2004) won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Museums

Foremost among Spain’s many art museums is thePrado Museum inMadrid, which began construction at the end of the 18th century and was completed in the early 19th century. Many of its paintings came from royal collections of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Prado also has an annex housing 19th- and early 20th-century art.

Other outstanding museums in Madrid include the SpanishMuseum of Contemporary Art, the Joaquín Sorolla Museum, and the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum. The Queen Sofía Museum, which opened in the early 1980s and is dedicated to modern andcontemporary art, houses Picasso’s famous muralGuernica, named for theBasque town bombed in 1937 by the fascists. Important museums outside the capital include thePicasso Museum and the Museum of Art ofCatalonia in Barcelona, the National Museum of Sculpture inValladolid, theEl Greco Museum inToledo, theGuggenheim Museum inBilbao, and the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art inCuenca.

There are a large number of special-interest museums. Some of them are national institutions, such as theNational Archaeological Museum in Madrid and the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, but many more are provincial or local institutions. There are also numerous museums attached to cathedrals and other religious institutions.

Libraries and archives

Spain has some 6,500 public and private libraries. Some important ones, such as the libraries of the palatial royal monastery ofEl Escorial near Madrid and of theUniversity of Salamanca, date back more than four centuries. Others are more recent, notably the National Library in Madrid, which was created in the 19th century.

Spain has avast number of public and private archives of various sorts: local, provincial, regional, and national. The most important are the National Historical Archive in Madrid, the General Archive of the Administration inAlcalá de Henares, the Archive of the Civil War inSalamanca, the General Archives of Simancas (established in 1540), and the Royal Archives of Aragon in Barcelona. Perhaps the most important for people outside Spain isSevilla’sArchives of the Indies, which hold an immense quantity of documentation about Spain’s former empire in the Americas.

Academies and institutes

Spain’s oldest and most famous academy is theRoyal Spanish Academy. Founded in 1713 underPhilip V, the first Bourbon king, it was modeled on theFrench Academy in Paris. Its most important task is to “cultivate and set standards for the purity and elegance of the Castilian language”; since 1951 it has done this in cooperation with similar scholarly institutions in Latin American countries to promote the lexicographical corpus of Spanish in the world. As part of this work, it publishes a massive dictionary intended to be the definitive work of its kind for the language.

There are a number of other cultural andintellectual academies and institutes, most of which date from the 18th and the 19th centuries. These include the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Royal Academy of History, and the Royal National Academy of Medicine. The most prestigious institution for research is theCouncil for Scientific Research (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; CSIC), anautonomous public research organization based in Madrid andaffiliated with the government Ministry of Education and Science. It was created in 1940 by the Franco regime to promote and manage research. Today there are branches of the CSIC throughout Spain, with the largest number of research centers being located in Madrid.

In its attempt to put itself at the center of the international Spanish-language cultural world, Spain awards theCervantes Prize, comparable to the Nobel Prize for Literature for all authors writing in Spanish. Among the recipients have been many of the leading Latin American writers. An agency for international cooperation maintains economic and cultural ties with the countries of Latin America and other countries with cultural links to Spain.

One of the most interesting culturalinitiatives was the creation in 1991 of theCervantes Institute. This government agency, modeled on the British Council and the German Goethe Institute, is responsible for promoting the study ofSpanish language andculture abroad. In the early 21st century, the Cervantes Institute operated in more than 60 cities in some 30 countries throughout the world.