Anaïs does not deliver a lecture. She spent six years in the education department of the Museo Picasso Málaga, where the job is not to recite what a painting means but to get a room full of people to notice it for themselves — a class of nine-year-olds, adults who have never set foot in a gallery, a visiting delegation of EU officials.

So she asks. What do you see here? Why do you think he changed his mind about that hand? What is going on in this face? You answer, the group answers, and between you the painting opens up. The people who arrive saying “I know nothing about art” are usually the ones doing most of the talking by the third room.

You meet her in the Plaza de la Judería and walk to the entrance together, about two minutes away. You go straight in, no queue, and step into the Renaissance courtyard of the sixteenth-century palace. Then, rather than marching through every room, you spend real time with a smaller selection: the astonishing academic paintings he made as a teenager, the Cubist experiments that took painting apart and rebuilt it, the portraits of the women who define each period of his life, and the restless canvases he was still making in his eighties.

Before the end you go down beneath the palace, to walk among the Phoenician and Roman ruins under the museum floor.

* The museum gives every guide exactly one hour inside, the same for everyone. The extra half hour is what surrounds it: the meeting point, the walk over and the palace courtyard before you go in.