To spot the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante, just look for a large, creamy stone building with symmetrical black-trimmed windows and little balconies, right across from the Santa María Church.
Standing here, you might feel the old barri’s heartbeat and hear your own footsteps echo on the stone-. This isn’t just any museum; the very walls started life way back in 1685 as “La Asegurada,” once a storehouse, jail, school, and even an archive-talk about having a midlife crisis! Centuries sped by, but things truly changed when Eusebio Sempere, a local artist with a taste for greatness, began collecting modern masterpieces to share with Alicante. Those first 177 works-by titans like Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Chagall, and Kandinsky-formed a collection so dazzling that when the doors opened in 1977, the city buzzed with pride.
The museum now rotates its permanent shows every four months, so you never know what awaits; one time it’s geometry bursting off the canvas, another it’s abstract color storms or lifelike portraits staring back. Today, the MACA boosts its collection further with the Juana Francés room, a treasure chest of 134 pieces left by a rebellious Alicante-born artist, plus more than 500 works from Sempere himself-including “mobile sculptures” that look ready to leap from their plinths at any moment.
If this looks brand new, your eyes don’t deceive you. The museum got its striking new look in 2011, thanks to keen architects who blended modern lines with Baroque bones-so even the building is a work of art. Step inside, and you might even catch a lively workshop or an urgent whisper of an international art deal--proving that in Alicante, creativity is never locked away, it’s always ready to surprise you!
