Madrid in 3 Days: The Art Triangle, the Districts and Toledo

Madrid with three days changes character, because it stops being just the Prado. The first day is the essential one: the Habsburgs, the great museum, the Retiro, Guernica. The second completes the art triangle with the Thyssen and heads into the districts — Malasaña, Chueca, the Rastro if it is Sunday — which are the reason madrileños are convinced they live in the best city in Europe. The third takes a train to Toledo, which is half an hour away and is worth a trip on its own: the city where Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in the same square kilometre for centuries.

Day 1 — The Habsburgs, the Prado, Guernica

7 km · 3 stops · 9:30am to midnight · the essential day

Morning – Royal Palace, Plaza Mayor, La Latina

9:30am-2pm · Palace about €14 · the rest free

The Palacio Real has 3,418 rooms and is the largest royal palace in Western Europe. It stands where the Arab Alcazar once stood, the fortress around which Madrid was born — the city was founded by the Arabs as a military outpost — which burned on Christmas night 1734, destroying over five hundred paintings, several by Velázquez among them. Inside: the Throne Room with its Tiepolo ceiling, the Armoury with the armour of Charles V and a Stradivari quartet, the only one in the world still kept together.

The Plaza Mayor from 1619 is an enclosed rectangle a hundred and twenty-nine metres by ninety-four with 237 balconies: it was a theatre for bullfights, coronations, markets and Inquisition trials, and the balconies were seating. The king watched from the Casa de la Panadería.

Lunch in La Latina, on Cava Baja: you stand at the bar, order a caña and a tapa, pay, and move to the next place. It is not an aperitif, it is how Madrid eats.

Afternoon – Museo del Prado

3:30-6:30pm · Ticket about €15, free in the last two hours of weekdays

The Prado is not an encyclopaedic collection like the Louvre: it is the private collection of the kings of Spain, the taste of a dynasty that for two centuries was the richest in Europe because it had the silver of the Americas.

With three hours: Las Meninas by Velázquez, the most argued-over painting in the history of art, with the mirror in the background where the king and queen appear, meaning they stand where you do; Goya’s Black Paintings, fourteen works made directly on the walls of his own house between 1819 and 1823, uncommissioned and never meant to be shown — the Saturn hung in the dining room; The Third of May 1808, the execution of madrileños by the French, the first modern painting about war; The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch, which Philip II kept in his bedroom; and the Titian room, Charles V’s court portraitist.

Evening – Retiro, Reina Sofía, tapas

7pm to midnight · Reina Sofía about €12, with free evening slots · Closed on Tuesdays

An hour in the Retiro, once the private garden of the kings, opened to the public only in 1868: the lake with rowing boats and the Palacio de Cristal, a glass-and-iron greenhouse built in 1887 for plants brought from the Philippines.

Then the Reina Sofía for Guernica: three and a half metres by nearly eight, painted in just over a month in 1937 after the bombing of the Basque town. Picasso left it in New York with one condition — it would return to Spain only with the return of public freedoms — and it arrived in 1981, six years after Franco’s death. Around it are the preparatory studies and the photographs Dora Maar took as the painting took shape.

Day 2 — The Thyssen and the districts

8 km · 4 stops · 10am into the night · the day you understand how madrileños live

Morning – Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

10am-1pm · Ticket about €14, free on Monday afternoon · Metro Banco de España

The Thyssen-Bornemisza completes the art triangle and has a precise role: it covers everything the Prado lacks. The collection was assembled over two generations by a family of steel industrialists and was the second-largest private collection in the world after the British crown’s; the Spanish state bought it in 1993, beating other countries in the bidding.

The route is chronological, running from thirteenth-century Italy to German expressionism and American pop, in a single thread: primitives, Van Eyck, Dürer, Caravaggio, then impressionists, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Hopper, Rothko. In three hours you cross eight hundred years of European painting, and it is the best way to put in order everything you saw the day before.

Early afternoon – Templo de Debod and Plaza de España

2:30-5pm · Free · Metro Plaza de España or Ventura Rodríguez

In the park above Plaza de España there is something that catches everyone off guard: a genuine Egyptian temple. The Templo de Debod was built in the third century BC in Nubia, near Aswan.

In the 1960s, construction of the Aswan Dam was about to submerge dozens of Nubian monuments. UNESCO launched an international campaign and several countries sent teams and money to dismantle, move and rebuild the temples; in gratitude, Egypt gave away four of them to the countries that had contributed the most. One went to Madrid: it was dismantled stone by stone, shipped over and reassembled here in 1972, oriented as the original. The other three are in New York, Turin and Leiden.

Go at sunset, which is when madrileños bring anyone who comes to visit: the temple reflects in the pool and the whole sierra opens up behind it. It is free, you can also go inside (with long queues at weekends), and it is one of the strangest sights in Europe.

Just below is Plaza de España, recently redone, with the monument to Cervantes and the bronze statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The Gran Vía starts from here.

Afternoon – Malasaña and Chueca

5:30-9pm · Free · Metro Tribunal

Malasaña takes its name from a fifteen-year-old girl killed by the French in the uprising of 2 May 1808 — the one Goya painted — and was the centre of the Movida madrileña, the cultural and social explosion of the 1980s that followed the end of the dictatorship, which produced Almodóvar, among others. Today it is the district of vintage shops, bookshops and bars, and around Plaza del Dos de Mayo people sit outside until late.

Next door is Chueca, Madrid’s gay district: since the 1990s it has gone from a run-down area to one of the liveliest districts in the city, with the best venues and an openness few European capitals have. The covered Mercado de San Antón has food stalls and a rooftop terrace.

In between, if you fancy a small museum: the free Museo de Historia de Madrid has a spectacular baroque façade and inside a model of the city in 1830 that shows just how fast Madrid grew.

Evening – La Latina, or the Rastro if it is Sunday

From 9:30pm on · Free · the Rastro is only on Sunday morning

Tapas dinner in La Latina, working your way round the taverns. If your second day falls on a Sunday, flip the plan and start with the Rastro: Madrid’s flea market, held since the sixteenth century in the streets around the Ribera de Curtidores, with over a thousand stalls spread across the whole district. Go in the morning, buy little and look a lot, and around one everyone moves on to the taverns of La Latina for vermú — draught vermouth, a Sunday ritual in Madrid with a tapa of olives or sardines.

Day 3 — Toledo

The whole day · high-speed train from Atocha, 33 minutes · book the train

If we had to choose a single day trip in Spain, it would be Toledo. It is thirty-three minutes away from Madrid on the high-speed train, on a crag surrounded on three sides by the Tagus, and that defensive geography is the reason the city has come down to us almost intact: a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

Why Toledo is different

It was capital of the Visigothic kingdom, then a Muslim city for four centuries, then retaken by the Christians in 1085. What matters is what happened next: for about three centuries Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in the same square kilometre, and the city became a unique centre of translation in Europe. At the School of Translators, backed by the kings of Castile, scholars of the three religions translated into Latin the Greek and Arabic texts — Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, Avicenna, al-Khwarizmi — that the West had lost. Much of what medieval Europe knew of mathematics, astronomy and philosophy passed through here.

It ended in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews, and then of the Muslims. Toledo also lost its role as capital when Philip II moved the court to Madrid in 1561, and it has stopped growing ever since: which is why it has stayed as it was.

What to see

5-6 hours · Cathedral about €12 · Tourist bracelet for seven monuments, about €12 · many climbs

The cathedral is one of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, built from 1226 on the site of the main mosque, itself built over the Visigothic church. Inside is the Transparente, a must-see: a baroque altar where a hole was cut into the Gothic vault to let a shaft of natural light fall on the tabernacle. In the eighteenth century it was a scandal, and it is pure theatre. The sacristy is a picture gallery with El Greco, Titian, Caravaggio, Goya.

El Greco lived in Toledo from 1577 until his death: he was Cretan, named Doménikos Theotokópoulos, and Spain simply called him «the Greek». In the church of Santo Tomé is his masterpiece, the Burial of the Count of Orgaz, painted for the exact spot where it hangs and never moved: the earthly world below, the heavenly one above, and the faces of Toledans of his own time among the mourners.

Two synagogues remain from the Jewish quarter, and they are as strange as the rest of the city: the fourteenth-century Sinagoga del Tránsito has mudejar — that is, Islamic-style — decoration with Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions, and is today the Sephardic Museum. Santa María la Blanca was built as a synagogue by Muslim craftsmen for a Jewish community under a Christian king, and later became a church: inside are white horseshoe arches that look like a mosque. The Mosque of Cristo de la Luz, from 999, is the oldest standing building in the city.

For the photograph: cross the Tagus and climb to the Mirador del Valle, on the far bank, from which you see the whole city on its crag with the Alcázar and the cathedral. A tourist bus runs there, or take a taxi.

Toledo is all uphill and the paving is uneven: wear proper shoes. From the station to the centre is a twenty-minute uphill walk, or a bus, or the public escalators that climb from the Bisagra gate. It gets very hot in summer: set off early.