After living in Madrid for two years and returning dozens of times, here is our definitive guide to Madrid — the Prado, tapas bars, the best neighborhoods, where to stay, and the day trips worth taking.
Plan a smarter trip to Spain with our guide to the best places to visit, when to go, food, culture, trains, packing, and slow travel ideas for travelers over 50.
Every traveler deserves a great gastronomic introduction to food in Madrid, Spain. These walking tours will help you find the places you’d never discover on your own, and wrap up your experience with great stories describing the history and culture of food in Spain.
A list of all the UNESCO World Heritage sites in Spain, with links to posts about the ones we have visited and photographed. There are 50 World Heritage Sites in Spain, the third most of any country. These include both cultural heritage sites and nature areas. Four are shared with other countries.
The Prado Museum in Madrid Spain is arguably the best in Europe, based on its art collection of masterpieces. The art was mostly gathered by three Spanish kings (16-17th Century), but has been curated and improved upon ever since. Here are six important works from the Prado.
Five Spanish cities revisited, with focus on cuisine and culture in the North of Spain. Barcelona, Zaragoza, Logroño, San Sebastián, and Madrid will always be new in our eyes.
This trip to Spain was unusual for us. It was fast, it was pre-planned, and it was with four others, Tom’s two brothers and their wives. Tom and I were … Read more
Three Unesco World Heritage sites, Segovia, El Escorial, and Alcalá de Henares are all easy day trips from Madrid.
When Kris and I lived in Madrid thirty-two years ago we worked at a language school that was about eight blocks from our apartment. One of the routes we often took to work took us past a nondescript building with two large oak doors and a small sign beside one of them which identified it as a convent. (Here’s the Google map.)
The same sign offered tours during limited hours, but in all the time we lived here, and in our many subsequent visits to Madrid, we never got around to seeing what was inside the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales. We remedied that this time.
Madrileños, unlike most denizens of big cities, are genuinely friendly and eager to talk about their city, Spain, and almost anything else you want to discuss. Our first night here, we had a discussion about journalism and its position as a profession in Spanish society over beers and a plate of olives at an outdoor cafe in the Plaza Mayor with a young man named José Angel. José Angel’s girlfriend is a journalist and he’s a carpenter, so he allowed as there was some friction with her parents over his “station” in life. I assured him that their positions would probably be reversed if he came to the United States and he’d be welcome to visit us anytime the in-laws got to be too much.
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