Art lovers visiting the Costa del Sol will soon have a new art gallery and museum to visit in the province of Andalucia.

The Baroness Thyssen Museum will open to the public on March 24, with works from Pablo Picasso, Joan Mirò and Antoni Tàpies among those on show in the Malaga city centre building.

The museum and gallery, based at the Villalon Palace, will house some 230 works from Spanish Baroness Carmen Thyssen’s private collection.

The baroness, also known as Tita Cervera, has been overseeing the building of the museum for the last two years, since she was granted permission to open it in 2009.

She has pledged to show the pieces, mainly work by artists from the Andalucia region, in her collection in Malaga until 2025.

One of the highlights is a piece by Francisco Zurbaran, a Spanish painter best known for still life and religious paintings of monks, nuns and martyrs.

The Baroness says the museum will also host temporary exhibitions of work by French artists such as Degas or Gauguin, which will come from the collection currently housed in the main Thyssen museum in Madrid.

Restoration work on the Villalon Palace has taken over two years and cost more than €11 million, while additional money has been spent on adjacent buildings to extend the museum.

The second show will be in the Autumn looking at the work of the Valencia painter, Joaquín Sorolla and also Claude Monet’s 1925 work ‘The House among the Roses”.

A Van Gogh exhibition is being organised for 2012 based around his work “Water Mill at Gennep”.