The museum's collections are distributed over five different venues: Santo Domingo Convent, Sarmiento Palace, the Castro Monteagudo building, and the García Flórez and Fernández López buildings.
At the 18th-century Castro Monteagudo building you can see collections of archaeology, traditional and civil pre-Roman and Roman precious metalwork (Fernández de la Mora collection), as well as Spanish, Italian and Flemish painting from the 15th-18th centuries. The García Flórez building dates from the 18th century and is joined to the aforementioned, with items in jet, engravings, religious sculptures, Sargadelos earthenware, the office of Admiral Méndez Núñez, and a reproduction of a chamber from the Numancia Frigate, as well as a traditional Galician kitchen. In the same square as the two buildings already mentioned is the Fernández López building, home to the exhibitions of 19th and 20th-century Spanish painting. Next to San Bartolomé Church is the Sarmiento building (18th century), which is dedicated to contemporary Galician painting and temporary exhibitions. In the ruins of the Santo Domingo Convent you can see diverse archaeological remains, such as Romanesque and Gothic capitals, sarcophagi and tombstones.
References:The Church of St Donatus name refers to Donatus of Zadar, who began construction on this church in the 9th century and ended it on the northeastern part of the Roman forum. It is the largest Pre-Romanesque building in Croatia.
The beginning of the building of the church was placed to the second half of the 8th century, and it is supposed to have been completed in the 9th century. The Zadar bishop and diplomat Donat (8th and 9th centuries) is credited with the building of the church. He led the representations of the Dalmatian cities to Constantinople and Charles the Great, which is why this church bears slight resemblance to Charlemagne's court chapels, especially the one in Aachen, and also to the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. It belongs to the Pre-Romanesque architectural period.
The circular church, formerly domed, is 27 m high and is characterised by simplicity and technical primitivism.