Picasso pilgrimage: a Spanish art trail marking 50 years since his death

From Málaga to Madrid, there’s a fiesta of special exhibitions this year in the places where the artist lived and worked

Pablo Picasso sits on a bench in Málaga’s Plaza de la Merced. Staring ahead, notebook in hand, elderly and made of bronze, he is as much a part of the city as the sea. It’s a wistful work. Picasso spent almost all his adult life – and died – in France, but no 20th-century artist is more Spanish than Picasso, with his bull motif, machismo, defining image of the civil war and fondness for Málaga wine.

“Living abroad,” he said, “one becomes even more Spanish.”