Museo Vostell Malpartida

Where it sits. The museum stands inside the Los Barruecos natural monument, a couple of kilometres south of the village of Malpartida de Cáceres and about fourteen kilometres west of the city of Cáceres. Its buildings are the long, low sheds of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wool-washing works, set directly on the shore of the Charca del Barrueco de Abajo, with granite boulders the size of lorries standing in the water and on the slopes behind. The setting does most of the curatorial work: this is contemporary art shown against a landscape of balanced rock, grazing cattle and nesting storks, with roughly fourteen thousand square metres of floor and yard to move through.

The story behind it. Wolf Vostell, born in Leverkusen in 1932 and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement and of the happening in Europe, came across Los Barruecos while driving through Extremadura with his family. In 1976 he embedded his own car — a black 1970 Opel Admiral — in a concrete slab among the boulders and called the result VOAEX, a concrete journey through Upper Extremadura. Its inauguration on 30 October 1976 doubled as the founding of the museum, which he created with his wife, the Extremaduran Mercedes Guardado. A second outdoor work, The Dead Man Who Is Thirsty, followed in 1978. Vostell's chosen home for the collection was the disused lavadero de lanas, where the fleeces of transhumant merino flocks had been scoured in pond water and dried on the surrounding rock — an industrial ruin whose scale suited work built from cars, televisions and motorcycles. The regional government of Extremadura financed a full restoration of the buildings from 1994, acquired the Vostell archive in 2005, and the museum received Spain's Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts in 2018.

What is inside. Three collections share the site. The first is Vostell's own work — dé-coll/age paintings, environments, video and the concrete-and-machinery sculptures for which he is best known, including The End of Parzival, built around twenty Sanglas motorcycles as a homage to Salvador Dalí. The second is the Fluxus collection donated by the Milanese gallerist and collector Gino Di Maggio, one of the most substantial holdings of Fluxus material anywhere in Spain, with pieces connected to George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys. The third is a collection of conceptual art given by the artists themselves. The Vostell archive, open to researchers, holds the correspondence, scores and documentation of a career that ran from post-war Cologne to Berlin, where Vostell died in 1998. Mercedes Vostell directed the museum until her death in 2023, and her son Levin now oversees its artistic programme. The vocabulary on the labels rewards a little preparation: Vostell built his practice on dé-coll/age, a term he took from a newspaper report in the mid-1950s and used for the tearing-down and layering of images that runs through the posters, the television works and the concrete pieces alike, and on the happening, the participatory event form he staged across Europe from 1958 onward.

Why it is worth the detour. Extremadura is not where visitors expect to find a serious international collection of post-war avant-garde art, and the disjunction is the point. Rooms of 1960s happening documentation open onto a courtyard of granite; a car set in concrete sits in a landscape of naturally balanced boulders that look, at a distance, like sculpture themselves. The museum has collaborated with the Goethe-Institut since 1988 on exhibitions, concerts and publications, and it draws close to fifty thousand visitors a year — many of whom arrive for the walking route around the ponds and stay for the art. In 2017 the National Geographic Society's Spanish edition ranked it among the thirty museums in the country most worth visiting.

Getting there and timing. From Cáceres the drive takes about twenty minutes on the N-521, turning south in Malpartida on a signposted lane that ends at the museum's car park inside the natural monument; buses reach Malpartida village, leaving a walk of roughly two kilometres. The museum closes on Mondays, charges a small admission with free days for residents, and takes a midday break outside the summer timetable. Combine it with the four-kilometre circuit around Los Barruecos, where white storks nest directly on the boulders from late winter into summer, and with the same landscape's other claim to fame: the plain immediately alongside is where Game of Thrones filmed the Loot Train Attack for its seventh season. Interiors are largely level, but the tracks between the outdoor works cross uneven granite and compacted earth.