Bolivia Guide
La Paz
Museo Nacional de Arte
Address: Southwest corner of Plaza Murillo Opening time: Tues– Sat 9am–12.30pm & 3–7pm, Sun 9am–12.30pm 
www.mna.org.bo Price: $1.25
The Palacio de Los Condes de Arana, one of La Paz's finest surviving colonial palaces, now houses the Museo Nacional de Arte, well worth visiting for its comprehensive collection of works by major Bolivian painters. Completed in 1775, when La Paz was at the peak of its colonial prosperity, the palace (also known as the Palacio de Diez Medina – it's not clear exactly who had it built) is a magnificent example of Baroque architecture, with a grand portico opening onto a central patio overlooked by three floors of arched walkways, all elaborately carved from pink granite in a Rococo style with stylized shells, flowers and feathers. The emphasis of the museum's art collection is firmly on colonial religious art. Amongst the highlights are several works by Melchor Pérez de Holguín, the great master of Andean colonial painting, and a magnificent eighteenth-century picture by an anonymous La Paz artist of an Archangel Arquebusero, an iconic image of an angel carrying a primitive firearm which neatly encapsulates the spiritual– military contradictions of the Spanish conquest. The museum's recent renovation has made specific provision for more visiting exhibition space, recently hosting works by painter/sculptor Diego Morales Barrera, whose treatment under the brutal early 1980s regime of Luis Garcia Meza led him to asylum in Switzerland.