Museo Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo Castillo de San José
The MIAC occupies the castle of San José, an eighteenth-century fortress raised above the sea in Arrecife. In 1976 César Manrique drove its restoration and turned it into a contemporary art museum, keeping the original stone and inserting a modern language into it. The collection brings together work by Canarian and mainland Spanish artists of the second half of the twentieth century. It is part of the Lanzarote network of Art, Culture and Tourism Centres.
The castle of San José was built in the eighteenth century on a headland of the Arrecife coast, with a defensive purpose and also as public works at a time of hardship on the island. Two centuries later César Manrique saw in the abandoned fortress the right container for a museum, and in 1976 the International Museum of Contemporary Art opened there.
The intervention is characteristic of Manrique: the basalt stone and the original vaults are left in view and the modern addition is subordinated to them, with large windows opening the hall towards the harbour. The collection focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, with names from the Canaries and the rest of Spain. The site is run within the Art, Culture and Tourism Centres of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, the same network that includes Jameos del Agua and Cueva de los Verdes.
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MIAC - Castillo de San José
International Museum of Contemporary Art set in an 18th-century fortress restored by César Manrique.
MIAC - Castillo de San José
International Museum of Contemporary Art set in an 18th-century fortress restored by César Manrique.
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