All our Madrid guides tagged Madrid.
How rooftop bars in Madrid work, which views are worth booking for, when the terraces are open, and how dress codes and minimum spends usually apply.
A painter's house with its garden intact, and a small chapel with a ceiling Goya painted himself. Both are quiet, both are quick, and one is free.
Free museum hours, a traditional weekday set lunch, a flat walkable centre and cheap public transport. Where the money actually goes in Madrid.
A capital where nobody minds children in a restaurant at ten at night, with two big parks, rowing boats, riverside playgrounds and a theme park.
Fried dough dipped in chocolate thick enough to stand a spoon in, eaten at six in the morning or six in the evening, in rooms serving it for a century.
A two hour walk from an avenue built in 1910 by demolishing fourteen streets, down into the tangle of alleys the demolition was meant to replace.
A night here has stages: vermouth, tapas, a proper drink, a rooftop, a club at two and churros at six. Where each stage happens and how to pace it.
No canals, no cathedral square with a violinist. What Madrid has instead is an Egyptian temple at sunset, a rowing boat, a glasshouse and dinner at eleven.
Flamenco is Andalusian, and Madrid is where it professionalised. How to tell a serious tablao from a dinner show, and what you are actually watching.
The city sits on a dry plateau and July afternoons are brutal. Locals restructure the day around the heat, and the day they build is a good one.
One has the sea, the architecture and the crowds. The other has the art, the food culture and a city that still belongs to the people who live in it.
Madrid is a safe city with a specific and well organised theft problem, concentrated in about six places. Knowing which six solves most of it.
Two shopping cities in one: chains on the pedestrian axes, and behind them a hundred year old glove maker, a guitar workshop and a cape-only shop.
Madrid's own dish is a chickpea stew served in three separate courses from the same pot, eaten at lunchtime in winter, and it takes an afternoon.
A flat city with a wall of sierra behind it looks better from the ninth floor: which rooftop bars are worth the price, and which views cost nothing.
A royal garden that became the city's living room: the boating lake, the glass palace, the free concerts and the hours when Madrid actually uses it.