AT A GLANCE

Why go?

The Casa-Museum José Segrelles in Albaida is the actual house and studio where one of Spain's greatest illustrators lived and worked, now preserved as his home and packed with his paintings. Set on the square that bears his name in this small Valencian town, it holds the largest anthology of Segrelles's work on earth—around 200 originals spanning his whole career, from early family portraits to the mystical oils he was finishing on his deathbed.↗↗↗

What makes the visit unusual is that this is a house built by the artist himself to show his own work. After years in Barcelona, London and New York, Segrelles returned to his hometown in 1932 and, using designs drawn up abroad, began building the museum-house in the early 1940s, living and painting here until he died on 3 March 1969. Inside, you wander rooms he conceived as a total artwork—his studio, an 'Arab Room', a 'Rose Arch'—displaying fantastical watercolours, literary illustrations, space-themed 'sidereal' visions and religious paintings side by side.↗↗

The museum is small, morning-hours only, and best visited by phone-ahead appointment, so plan it as a focused stop rather than a casual drop-in; pair it with Albaida's parish church, whose ceiling lunettes Segrelles painted and which locals call his 'Sistine chapel'.