4 Best Sights in Extremadura, Spain

The Casa de las Veletas (House of the Weather Vanes) is a 12th-century Moorish mansion that is now used as the city's museum. Filled with archaeological finds from the Paleolithic through Visigothic periods, the museum also includes an art section with works by El Greco, Picasso, and Miró. The highlight is the superbly preserved Moorish cistern—the aljibe—with horseshoe arches supported by mildewy stone pillars.

Across the street from the entrance to the Roman sites and connected by an underground passage is Mérida's superb Roman art museum, in a building designed by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. Walk through a series of passageways to the luminous, cathedral-like main exhibition hall, which is supported by arches the same proportion and size (50 feet) as the Roman arch in the center of Mérida, the Arco de Trajano (Trajan's Arch). Exhibits include mosaics, frescoes, jewelry, statues, pottery, household utensils, and other Roman works. The crypt beneath the museum contains the remains of several homes and a necropolis that were uncovered while the museum was being built in 1981.

An abandoned 18th-century church contains this easily digestible museum compiling some of the most important Visigothic artworks on the Iberian Peninsula. It's a branch of the Museo Nacional de Arte Romano, in a separate location north of the Plaza de España, in Mérida's old town.

The Pizarro family residence is now a modest museum dedicated to the connection between Spain and Latin America. The first floor emulates a typical home from 15th-century Trujillo, and the second floor is divided into exhibits on Peru and Pizarro's life there. The museum explains the "Curse of the Pizarro," recounting how the conquistador and his brothers were killed in brutal battles with rivals; those who survived never again enjoyed the wealth they had achieved in Peru. Glaringly absent from the museum is any mention of what Pizarro's conquests wrought: mass murder of Incas, feudalism and enslavement, forced conversions to Catholicism, and so on.  The museum closes from 2 to 4.