With so much to do in Madrid, don't waste a minute waiting in lines and gawking at art without a clue of what it all means. This five-hour semi-private combo tour of Madrid's most visited museums will allow up to eight guests to understand and enjoy both the Prado and the Reina Sofia, two sites that you simply must experience.

Begin your tour at one of the most visited monuments in Madrid, the Prado Museum. Built in the late 1700s, the Prado began showcasing art in the early 1800s. Predominantly featuring paintings, it also has sculptures and prints among thousands of works dating from the 1200s. The most famous pieces include Las Meninas or The Maids of Honor, an inventive self-portrait by Spanish-born Velazquez, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych from Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.

The Prado houses the largest collection of Italian masterpieces outside of Italy, featuring works like The Annunciation by Fra Angelico and David and Goliath by Caravaggio. With your expert guide, you will hear all about the stories and scandals behind artists including Goya, Rembrandt, El Greco, and others.

You will then enter the Reina Sofia Museum, housing one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. In the 1990s, a former hospital was renovated and turned into the Reina Sofia, home to 20th-century art mostly from Spanish artists. Your expert guide will discuss the various artistic movements on display here, including abstractionism, cubism, surrealism, and modernism. You will learn all about Spain's most famous artistic export, Pablo Picasso, while standing in front of his world-changing painting, Guernica.

See works by Joan Miro, like The Man with a Pipe, as well as Salvador Dali's Face of the Great Masturbator as you learn about the techniques and stories behind these sometimes offbeat works of art. Your guide will situate all of these works in their larger social and political contexts, allowing you to understand how events like the Spanish Civil War shaped these artists' lives and works. By the end, you will have experienced one of Spain's, and the world's, most exquisite collections of contemporary art, which no trip to Madrid should go without.