It’s easy to dive headlong into lively Madrid, Spain’s capital city. With plenty of pedestrian-friendly streets, shops, and appetizer-stocked bars, the city is vibrant day and night. The two top sights are the lavish Royal Palace and the incomparable Prado Museum. (You can visit Madrid this week by watching the first show of my latest public television series, “Rick Steves’ Europe,” premiering at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday on KCTS Channel 9.)
The Royal Palace, with its gilded rooms and frescoed ceilings, rivals the greatest palaces of Europe. After the original fortress burned down, King Phillip V commissioned this huge 18th-century residence as a replacement. Though he ruled Spain for 40 years, Phillip was very French. He ordered the palace built to be his own Versailles, with more than 2,000 rooms with tons of luxurious tapestries, a king’s ransom of chandeliers, priceless porcelain, and bronze decor covered in gold leaf.
While these days the royal family lives in a mansion a few miles away, this place still functions as a royal palace, and is used for formal state receptions and tourists’ daydreams.
Madrid’s Prado Museum has the continent’s top collection of paintings, displaying art from Spain’s glory days, the 16th and 17th centuries. The Spanish Empire was Europe’s greatest, filling its coffers with gold from the New World and art from the Old.
Heaven and earth have always existed side by side in Spain – religion and war, Grand Inquisitors and cruel conquistadors, spirituality and sensuality. The Prado has a surprisingly worldly collection of paintings for a country in which the medieval Inquisition lasted up until modern times. But it’s just this rich combination of worldly beauty and heavenly mysticism that is so typically Spanish.
The Prado is known for jaw-dropping classics that fit this confusing criteria: Hieronymous Bosch’s cryptic triptych “The Garden of Delights,” Albrecht Drer’s “Adam and Eve” (the first full-size nudes in Northern European art), and Francisco de Goya’s “Nude Maja,” a real shocker at the time – a sensual figure painted by a pious Spaniard.
After visiting the Prado, enjoy a picnic in the vast Retiro Park nearby, with its inviting lake and rental rowboats.
For a look at 17th-century Spain, hang out in Plaza Mayor (Main Square). It’s vast, cobbled, and traffic-free. Each side of the square is uniform, as if a grand palace were turned inside out. The centerpiece: a statue of Philip III, who ordered the square’s construction. Upon this stage, much Spanish history was played out, from royal pageantry to executions and bullfights.
Stop by the bull bar on the square. The Torre del Oro Bar Andalu is a temple to bullfighting. Its walls are plastered with photos depicting bulls’ and bullfighters’ gory triumphs and defeats.
Nearby is the city’s bustling San Miguel produce market, shops selling squid-ring sandwiches, and cave-like bars called mesones. If you like sangria and singing, visit any of these bars on a weekend night. They get packed with locals who – emboldened by sangria, the setting, and Spain – might suddenly just start singing. Hum along. You’re in Madrid, city of royal palaces, world-class masterpieces … and Spanish karaoke.
Rick Steves of Edmonds (425-771-8303, www.ricksteves.com) is the author of 27 European travel guidebooks including “Europe Through the Back Door” (published by Avalon) and host of the PBS-TV series “Rick Steves’ Europe.” The Madrid show, which airs Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., is repeated on Saturday at 5 p.m.
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