Fewer people, more time for real conversation and questions.

Picasso was born in Málaga, just a few minutes from the Buenavista Palace, which holds the museum collection today. The majority of the artwork in that collection is owned by Picasso's own family. That is what makes this museum different from every other Picasso collection in the world, and it is the thread I follow.

You meet me in the Plaza de la Judería, right in the city centre, and we walk to the museum entrance together — about two minutes away. When we get there we go straight in, no waiting in line, and step into the beautiful Renaissance courtyard of the sixteenth-century palace. From there, rather than marching through every room, we spend real time with a smaller selection of works: the astonishing academic paintings Picasso 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 painting in his eighties.

I am an official guide of Andalusia, and I spent six years working inside these walls. That means the kind of detail you only pick up by standing in front of the same paintings every day for six years — which brushstroke he changed his mind about, which room to enter from which side, which story the wall label leaves out.

Because the group never includes more than twelve people, this works as a conversation rather than a lecture. Ask what you actually want to know, including the question everyone is thinking: why is this considered great? By the end, you will be able to look at a Picasso and read it, instead of nodding politely at it.

The museum gives each guide one hour inside, the same for everyone. The extra half hour is what surrounds it: meeting in the Plaza de la Judería, the short walk over, and the courtyard of the palace before we go in — so the visit doesn't begin and end at the gallery door.