What to do in Madrid?

What we would do here

Not a place to walk into, but something to do: our pick per area.

• Churros at the hour Madrid eats them

  In Madrid churros with chocolate are not a dessert but what you eat at the end of the night or early in the morning, and the old places are built for exactly that. The hour is the whole difference

• A Spanish cooking class
  Kitchen Club · 5 stars · 3616 reviews

  Madrid gathers the kitchens of every Spanish region, and one class puts them in order: where the tortilla comes from, what makes a good croqueta, and why pisto is not ratatouille. It also changes how you read a menu afterwards

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• A rowing boat on the Retiro lake

  This park was a private royal garden and the lake was dug for it. Boats still go out on it, and it is how people from Madrid use the park rather than just crossing it

• A studio workshop after the museums
  Arte Hoy · 4.8 stars · 100 reviews

  After a day in the Prado and the Reina Sofia, a short studio session turns looking into doing: you work with your hands in a small group instead of moving from hall to hall. It also makes a good break between two museums

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• A cocktail workshop

  Malasaña and Chueca are where Madrid's bartenders work, and the bars there are small and serious. A workshop here happens behind the same bar you drink at afterwards

• A tapas crawl on foot

  In La Latina tapas is not a dish you order but a shape of an evening: you stand, eat one thing and move on. Without someone who knows the order it just looks like a street full of bars

• A film at the cinematheque
  Filmoteca Espanola Cine Dore · 4.6 stars · 3075 reviews

  Cine Dore is a nineteen twenties hall that still screens films, and its tickets cost far less than a regular cinema. Screenings are in the original language, so it works even if your Spanish is basic

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• A tasting of Spanish wines

  Spain is one of the world's largest wine producers and most of its regions are unknown outside it, and Madrid is where you can taste across all of them without travelling. Salamanca is the quarter where that is done seriously

• A tour of the Real Madrid stadium
  Estadio Santiago Bernabeu · 4.8 stars · 1738 reviews

  The tour goes down the players' tunnel, through the dressing room and ends in the trophy hall, and it is the place that explains why football here is treated as an institution rather than a sport. Anyone who manages to get a match ticket sees the same place alive

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• A damascene workshop, gold inlaid in steel

  Toledo has worked steel since the middle ages, and inlaying gold wire into black is the craft that remains from it. The small workshops in the old town still do it by hand

• Walking in the Guadarrama mountains

  The ridge above El Escorial is a national park, and it is why the kings built here in the first place: cool, wooded and close to Madrid. Almost everyone who comes goes into the monastery and returns

• A mountain day with a guide
  Sendero Vertical · 4.9 stars · 266 reviews

  The Guadarrama begins just beyond El Escorial, and with a guide you can take routes that are hard to navigate alone and climb on the rock itself. It is how you see the mountain side of Madrid rather than the city

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