Madrid in Two Days

My train left Málaga as scheduled at 7:30 in the morning, calling at Antequera and Córdoba before reaching Madrid at half past ten. I had an hour to kill until my friend Victoria arrived from Barcelona, so I took a short walk from the train station, passing by the Lope de Vega House Museum on the way to the Metrópolis Building. From the eastern end of the Gran Vía, I looped back along the Cibeles Fountain, and we met at a brunch restaurant close to the train station. A long queue, I noticed, was snaking its way along the Museo del Prado, so we decided to visit it first thing in the morning the next day rather than in the afternoon.

Our itinerary for the first day was as follows. First, we visited El Retiro Park, strolling around the ponds by the Crystal Palace and the Monument to Alfonso XII. As it was a Sunday, the park was filled with tourists, parents with prams, and street musicians. A number of visitors were also renting small paddle boats to sail around the large pond in front of the Alfonso XII, which seemed like a pleasant activity on a sunny winter day. Leaving the park, we passed by the Alcalá Gate before walking along the Gran Vía and making our way west: we visited the town squares of Puerta del Sol, Plaza Mayor and Plaza de Oriente before reaching the Temple of Debod.

The Temple of Debod is one of the more striking sights in Madrid. Unfortunately, we did not venture inside as it requires advance booking, but the structure and its history are highly interesting. Egypt gifted the temple to Spain in 1968 after Spain assisted in the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, which sought to preserve the monuments that would have otherwise been flooded by the construction of the Aswan Dam. The initiative saw the disassembly of the famous Abu Simbel and its reassembly on an artificial hill above the water. The Temple of Debod was another relocated temple, as were structures donated to other participating countries including the USA, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany.

By the time we reached the Temple of Debod, the sun had started to set, and we decided to walk back through the city and through the cosey neighbourhood of Salamanca to our apartment in Chamberí.

On the morning of the second day, we ate breakfast and called an Uber to the Prado. We did not intend to travel so extravagantly when we planned this trip and specifically rented a room close to a metro station, but Victoria found that the ride would only cost eight euros, or four euros per person, which seemed acceptable. We arrived just in time to join the queue before it extended past the corner of the Prado. This gave us just enough time to decide what we would see: the famous pieces of Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Dürer, and Raphael, and of course Bosch’s fantastical Garden of Earthly Delights.

We ate lunch and stopped for churros with hot chocolate right after our two-and-a-half-hour visit. In the afternoon, we took a look at the Royal Palace and the Cathedral, though we only entered the latter since the queue for the palace was absurdly long, spilling into at least three parallel lines on the plaza. I thought the Cathedral had very interesting, tropical-coloured and exotically patterned ceilings, though the rest of it felt rather unremarkable. After that, we walked past the Royal Basilica of Saint Francis and the Gate of Toledo before finishing the day with a short visit of the National Museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. We wandered around the lower levels trying to make sense of the post-modern installations until we mustered enough cheekiness to ask where the Picasso and Dalí paintings were.

On our last day in Madrid, we only visited the Botanical Garden, as our trains were both scheduled to leave at half past twelve, and very few attractions in Spain open before ten in the morning. The gardens were rather small and perhaps not the optimal place to visit with frost on the ground, but it was a pleasant visit nonetheless. The gardens have a unique bonsai terrace with specimens that are slowly going on a hundred years.