Four days in Madrid: A capital with no river and four centuries of paintings

Habsburg Madrid on arrival, a full day among the paintings, the palace and an Egyptian temple at sunset, and a Goya collection nobody queues for on the last morning.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Madrid
Places
11 across 4 days
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Madrid is a made capital. Philip II moved the court here in 1561 to a town of no particular importance, chosen mostly because it sat in the middle of the map, and everything since has been built on top of that decision. There is no cathedral worth the name until the 1990s and no river to speak of, and the city is still one of the most enjoyable in Europe.

What it has instead is paintings. The kings spent four centuries buying them, and the collection ended up in a row of buildings along a single boulevard, so an art day in Madrid is a walk rather than a series of taxi rides. It also has an evening culture that starts when other cities are going to bed: dinner at half past nine, streets full at midnight, and squares that do not empty until the bars close.

Four days is enough for the paintings, the old Habsburg centre, the palace and one long evening outdoors, with room left for Toledo or Segovia if you want a fifth. Three nights, one hotel, everything within a half hour walk or two metro stops.

Highlights

  • The Prado at opening, with Las Meninas to yourself for about ten minutes
  • Guernica in the Reina Sofía, still the size of a wall and still the reason people go quiet
  • The palace courtyard and the cathedral facing each other across it, both free to look at
  • Sunset behind a 2,000 year old Egyptian temple on the ridge above the Manzanares

Where to stay

Madrid, three nights

One base for all four days. The old centre, the museum boulevard, the palace and the park form a rough square about two kilometres across, and you can walk from any corner of it to any other in half an hour.

Madrid sits at about 650 metres on a dry plateau, which is why August is punishing and January mornings can be below freezing. It also means the light is very good and the evenings cool off quickly.

Day by day

Day 1 in Madrid

Puerta del Sol, Plaza Mayor and the old town

The Habsburg core is small and free, which makes it the right first afternoon. Sol is the middle of the city in a literal sense, and the arcaded square five minutes west of it is the one every visitor photographs.

Below Plaza Mayor, the streets slope down into La Latina, which is where Madrid actually eats and drinks. Start early enough to walk it in daylight and end up there when it fills.

  1. 15:00

    Puerta del Sol

    Architecture

    The plaza everything is measured from: the paving slab outside the old post office is kilometre zero for the six radial roads of Spain, and the clock above it is what the whole country watches on New Year's Eve, eating a grape at each of the twelve strokes. The bronze bear reaching into a strawberry tree on the east side is the city's coat of arms and the standard place to meet somebody.

  2. 15:45

    Plaza Mayor

    Architecture

    Five minutes southwest, an enclosed rectangle ringed by uniform red facades with nine archways cut into them, finished in 1619 and rebuilt after the fire of 1790. It has held markets, bullfights, canonisations and public executions; today it holds terraces charging square-in-the-middle prices. The painted building on the north side, the bakers' guild hall, is worth standing back from.

  3. 19:00

    Gran Vía

    Landmark

    The avenue cut diagonally through the old streets between 1910 and 1929, and the reason Madrid has a skyline at all. Walk it from the Alcalá end at dusk when the signs come on, past the cinemas and the 1920s American-style towers. It is loud, it is commercial and it is the best free spectacle in the city.

  4. 21:15

    Tapas in La Latina

    Eat

    The streets below Plaza Mayor, around Cava Baja, are lined end to end with bars. One plate and one beer at each of three or four is the local method, and nothing gets going before half past nine.

With more time: With a morning arrival, the Mercado de San Miguel just off Plaza Mayor is an iron market hall turned into food stalls, expensive but useful for an early bite. The Palacio de Cibeles at the top of the boulevard has a viewing floor with the best sightline over the roofs of the centre.

Day 2 in Madrid

The Prado, the Reina Sofía and the Retiro

The whole day happens on one kilometre of boulevard. The Paseo del Prado runs from the fountain of Cibeles down to Atocha with the three great collections strung along it, and the park climbing the slope on its eastern side.

Do the Prado first and do it properly: two to three hours, Spanish rooms first, and no attempt to see all of it. The 20th century museum at the bottom of the hill is smaller, quicker and hits harder, and the park at the end of the afternoon is the recovery.

  1. 10:00

    Museum Triangle

    Culture

    The Prado, opened in 1819 out of the royal collection, and the strongest gallery of Spanish painting anywhere. Las Meninas is the room everybody stands in; the Goya black paintings downstairs are the ones people leave quiet. Go at opening, start with Velázquez and Goya, and accept that the Flemish and Italian rooms are another visit. The Thyssen collection across the road covers everything the kings did not buy, if one museum is not enough.

  2. 13:30

    Lunch off the boulevard

    Eat

    Walk two streets west into Barrio de las Letras for a set lunch at a normal price. The cafés on the Paseo itself are priced for people who have just come out of a museum.

  3. 15:00

    Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

    Historic

    Ten minutes south, in an 18th century hospital with glass lift shafts bolted to the front. Guernica is here, painted for the Spanish pavilion in Paris in 1937 and kept out of the country until 1981, and the rooms of preparatory sketches around it are what make it land. Dalí and Miró fill the floors above. Closed Tuesdays.

  4. 17:30

    Parque del Retiro

    Nature

    Up the hill and into the old royal garden, laid out in the 1630s and handed to the public in 1868. Rowing boats on the lake, a glass pavilion built in 1887 to hold plants from the Philippines, and on a Sunday evening a drum circle that has been going for decades. The best hour here is the last one before dark.

With more time: The botanical garden next door to the Prado is a quiet, cheap way to spend forty minutes and almost nobody in the queue outside knows it is there. If the Reina Sofía does not appeal, the archaeological museum north of the park covers the peninsula from prehistory to the Moors, and the Lady of Elche is in it.

Day 3 in Madrid

The Royal Palace, Almudena and the Templo de Debod

West of the old centre the ground falls away towards the river, and the Habsburgs and then the Bourbons built along the edge of it. The palace and the cathedral face each other across a courtyard, and the view west from the terrace behind them runs to the mountains on a clear day.

Keep the last hour of the day free and walk north to the ridge above the park, where an Egyptian temple stands in a shallow pool. It is the sunset spot everybody in Madrid knows about, so go early and expect company.

  1. 10:00

    Royal Palace

    Historic

    Built from 1738 on the site of the old fortress that burned down on Christmas Eve 1734, and enormous: over 3,000 rooms, of which you walk perhaps twenty. The throne room ceiling by Tiepolo and the porcelain room are the two that stay with you. No monarch has lived here since 1931, which is why so much of it is open.

  2. 12:30

    Catedral de la Almudena

    Religious

    Across the courtyard, the cathedral Madrid took a century to build: begun in 1883, stalled by war and money, and not consecrated until 1993. The exterior was made to match the palace, and the interior is startling, a ceiling of hard modern colour over a neo-Gothic frame. Climb the dome for the roofline if it is open.

  3. 14:00

    Lunch around Ópera

    Eat

    The streets between the palace and the opera house have plenty at reasonable prices, and a set lunch here buys you the sit-down that the palace floors have earned.

  4. 19:00

    Templo de Debod

    Religious

    A small Egyptian temple from the 2nd century BC, given to Spain in 1968 for helping rescue the monuments of Nubia from the rising water behind the Aswan dam, and rebuilt stone by stone on this ridge. Free, and capped at a few dozen people inside at a time, so there is usually a queue. The reason to come is what is behind it as the sun goes down.

With more time: Ten minutes northwest, the Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida has a dome frescoed by Goya, who is buried under it, and it takes twenty minutes and costs nothing. The old royal hunting ground across the river is a proper forest with a cable car running into it from the Rosaleda.

Day 4 in Madrid

Goya without a queue, and a rooftop on Alcalá

The last morning is for the collection everybody walks past. The fine arts academy on Calle de Alcalá is five minutes from Sol, holds a room of Goyas including the self-portrait, and is usually close to empty.

Three hundred metres further down the same street there is a rooftop with a bar on it, which is the right last look at the city before the metro to the airport or the walk down to Atocha.

  1. 10:00

    Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

    Culture

    The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where Goya was once director and where Picasso lasted a matter of months as a student. The Goya rooms are the reason to come: the self-portrait, the Burial of the Sardine, and the small panels he painted for himself. Cheap, central, and quiet even in August.

  2. 11:30

    Círculo de Bellas Artes

    Culture

    A 1920s arts club in a wedding cake of a building, with a rooftop terrace open to anybody who pays the few euros at the door. The view runs from the Cibeles fountain and the old post office along Gran Vía and out to the mountains. Drinks are priced for the view, which for once is fair.

  3. 13:00

    Last coffee before Atocha

    Eat

    It is a twenty minute walk downhill to the station, or two stops on the metro. The old glasshouse inside Atocha is worth arriving early for.

With more time: With a later flight, the Sorolla house up beyond Alonso Martínez is a painter's home kept as he left it, with an Andalusian garden and no crowd. Left luggage is available at Atocha, so the morning does not have to be done with a suitcase.

Before you go

Where to stay

The area between Sol, the Ópera and Plaza Mayor puts you inside the old centre and within walking distance of everything on these four days. It is busy, and rooms facing the street are loud until late, so ask for one at the back.

Barrio de las Letras, southeast of Sol, is the better compromise: the same walking distances, older buildings, more places to eat that are not aimed at visitors, and five minutes from the museum boulevard.

Chueca and Malasaña, on the far side of Gran Vía, are where Madrid goes out. Good if that is what you came for, and a mistake if you want to sleep before two. Salamanca, east of the Retiro, is quiet, expensive and slightly dull, which some people want after three days of this.

Getting in and around

Barajas airport is 13 km northeast of the centre. Metro line 8 runs from all four terminals to the Nuevos Ministerios interchange in about fifteen minutes, plus a supplement of a few euros on top of the normal fare. The Cercanías train from Terminal 4 is the alternative and reaches Chamartín and Atocha directly.

High speed trains from Barcelona, Valencia, Seville and Málaga use Atocha, at the southern end of the museum boulevard, and the old 1892 train shed next to the modern platforms has been a tropical glasshouse since the station was rebuilt. Trains north, to Bilbao, Burgos and the coast, mostly leave from Chamartín instead, so check which station is on the ticket rather than assuming.

In the city, buy a ten-trip Metrobús card, which works on both metro and bus and costs roughly half what ten singles do. It can be shared between people, which the equivalent in Barcelona cannot. The card itself costs a couple of euros on top.

Almost everything here is walkable. The metro is worth it for the airport, for Chamartín and for getting home at one in the morning, and very little else.

What to book ahead

The Royal Palace sells timed tickets and the queue without one is long from ten in the morning. The changing of the guard happens on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, with a larger ceremony on the first Wednesday of most months, and it draws a crowd to the courtyard whether or not you have a ticket.

The Prado and the Reina Sofía both take online bookings, both sell out on a wet weekend, and both give free entry for the last two hours of the day. Free entry is genuinely free and genuinely packed, and it is the wrong way to see either of them for the first time.

The 20th century collection closes on Tuesdays and the Prado does not close at all except on a handful of holidays. Flamenco in the old tablaos is dinner and a show, booked, and priced accordingly.

Eating, and the clock

Madrid eats later than almost anywhere in Europe. Lunch runs from two to four and is the main meal of the day, dinner rarely starts before nine and often nearer ten, and a kitchen that is serving at seven in the evening is serving tourists. Plan around it rather than fighting it: a long lunch and a late dinner is how the day works here.

The local dishes are heavier than the coast: cocido madrileño, a chickpea stew served in courses across a whole afternoon, callos in a paprika sauce, and bocadillo de calamares, a squid sandwich sold from the bars around Plaza Mayor. Madrid is a long way from the sea and eats more fish than most ports, all of it trucked in overnight.

Tapas here are usually bought rather than free, unlike Granada. The going order is a caña, a small draught beer, and one plate at each of several bars rather than a whole meal in one.

The thing people remember about Madrid is rarely a building. It is the hour between nine and ten at night, when the heat has gone, the streets fill with people of every age, and dinner has not started yet.

If you add a day, take the train to Toledo. Thirty-three minutes from Atocha, a walled city on a granite loop of the Tagus, and three religions' worth of architecture inside the walls.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is four days enough for Madrid?
Yes for the city itself, with time to sit down in it. What four days does not leave room for is a day trip, and Toledo and Segovia are both half an hour away by high speed train and both worth a whole day. If either appeals, make it five.
Should I book the Prado in advance?
Book it if you are going at a weekend, in summer, or on a rainy day. The rest of the time turning up at opening works, and opening is the best hour of the day in there anyway. The free last two hours are packed and are a poor introduction.
Madrid or Barcelona?
Barcelona for architecture, the sea and a compact old town. Madrid for paintings, for eating and drinking, and for the sense of a working capital that happens to be full of visitors rather than a city built around them. Three hours apart by train, so the honest answer is both.
Is it safe?
Very, by the standards of large European cities, and you can walk home across the centre at two in the morning without much thought. Pickpocketing around Sol, Gran Vía and the metro is the one real risk, and it is the usual advice: nothing in a back pocket, bag in front on a crowded train.
When should I go?
April to June and late September to November. July and August regularly pass 35 degrees, the city empties of its own residents, and a lot of the good places close for the month. Winter is cold, bright and cheap, and the museums are at their best when it is raining outside.
Can I change the order of these days?
Yes, with two constraints: the Reina Sofía is shut on Tuesdays, and the palace courtyard is busiest on the mornings the guard changes. Copy the trip into JourneyComposer and the four days arrive as an editable plan with everything on the map, ready to have Toledo dropped in.