The Museo Provincial de Palencia, housed in the Casa del Cordón on Calle Colón, covers the archaeology and history of the province from prehistoric times through the medieval period. The Roman and Visigothic collections are particularly strong, reflecting the importance of the Palencia region in the early history of the Iberian Peninsula. The Casa del Cordón building itself, a 16th-century aristocratic palace, is worth seeing for its carved stone doorway and courtyard.
The museum is small enough to cover in an hour without feeling rushed. The Roman mosaics from villa sites in the province and the collection of Romanesque carved capitals from demolished rural churches give a good sense of how densely settled and culturally rich this now-quiet region was in earlier centuries.