Since 1992 the Thyssen family's art collection has been on display at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. However, Carmen Thyssen has been an art collector in her own right since the 1980s, and her personal collection is shown separately across the most beautiful cities in Spain. In 1999, she agreed to display many items from her collection in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum for a period of twelve years. Meanwhile, a home for her collection was sought in Málaga. This museum, a conversion of a sixteenth-century building, opened to the public on 24 March 2011. The Carmen Thyssen Museum of Malaga is dedicated to conservation, research and the dissemination of the Carmen Thyssen Collection in order to emphasize the value of Spanish painting, especially that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fully referenced in its historical and artistic context, for the understanding of all audiences, which forms part of Malaga's strategy as a cultural city.