The Museo del Prado in Madrid has opened a trail through its own galleries that asks visitors to look at familiar paintings with an engineer's eye. Engineering at the Prado: A Bridge between Art and Technology, which runs from 26 October 2026 to 21 February 2027, links 29 works from the permanent collection across the Villanueva Building, using bridges, roads, ports, mills and fortifications as its thread. It is a collaboration with Fundación Fhecor and was put together by the engineers Francisco Javier Fernández Pozuelo and Francisco Javier León.

Rather than gathering the works into a single gallery, the museum has arranged them as an itinerary through the collection, organised in three thematic groups. In some paintings the built world is the subject itself; in others it sits quietly in the background or hides in a detail that is easy to miss. The selection spans the fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries and includes works by Goya, El Greco, Mantegna, Antonio Joli and Mariano Ramón Sánchez.

Several of the chosen paintings preserve a kind of technical memory that no longer exists in the landscape. Antonio Carnicero's depiction of a Montgolfier balloon rising over Aranjuez records an early moment in the history of flight, while Sánchez painted bridges that have since been lost or rebuilt. Other works show Juanelo Turriano's water-lifting device in Toledo, an ingenious piece of sixteenth-century machinery. Seen together, the paintings become a record of how infrastructure shaped cities and territory over centuries.

The route is part of a wider Prado effort to open up new readings of its collection through thematic trails. Public talks in November and December will accompany the itinerary, helping visitors recognise how art can document the history of engineering and the built environment. The museum presents the project as a bridge of its own, between artistic creation and technical culture.