AUDIOGUIDES
Museum of art ‘Doña Pakyta’
This house, an example of regionalist architecture, was built in 1928 by the municipal architect of Almeria, Guillermo Langle, and is known as the “Casa Vasca” (Basque House) or “Casa Montoya” (Montoya House). It is a clear example of “mountain” or “neo-Basque” style which is rather unusual in a southern, Mediterranean city like Almeria.
Don Antonio González Egea commissioned it for his private residence, possibly imitating a house in the French city of Biarritz. It was later owned by his son Don José González Montoya and his wife Doña Francisca Díaz Torres, known as Doña Paquita. After the death of Doña Paquita in 2014, the house was donated and transformed into a cultural centre with a permanent exhibition.
The space was adapted for a museum by architect Ramón de Torres. It houses a collection of nearly a hundred years of art made in Almeria and by Almerienses, covering in its seven rooms the pictorial art from the last decades of the 19th century and its continuation of aesthetic academic models of the 20th century to the emergence of the Indaliano Group at the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s, with special attention to the works of the “seven” that comprised this movement in its beginning: Perceval, Capuleto, Rueda, López Díaz, Alcaraz, Cañadas y Cantón Checa.
Thanks to the combined synergies of the City Council and the Art Foundation ‘Ibáñez Cosentino’, one can now enjoy this Museum of Art Doña Pakyta, which recalls the splendour of the city’s bourgeoisie houses at the beginning of the 20th century.
