Madrid keeps its best hours late. Plan the daylight properly.
Which Prado ticket skips the real queue. What the Toledo day actually costs by bus. Whether the tablao with dinner is worth double the one without. Reviews of every tour and ticket you can book in Madrid.
Four bookings that hold a first Madrid week together.
One day out of the city, one palace, one gallery afternoon and one long evening. What each costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The day outGuided Day Trip to Toledo by BusToledo by coach, back before dinner. Thirty minutes of motorway buys you a walled city on a granite bluff above the Tagus.
02The palace morningRoyal Palace Expert Guided Tour with Skip-the-LineEurope’s largest royal palace by floor area, and the throne room is not the half of it. Go on the first slot: the state rooms fill by eleven.
03The gallery hourPrado Museum Entry TicketThe plain Prado ticket. Velazquez, Goya’s black paintings and Bosch for the price of two vermouths.
04The long eveningTapas & Wine Tasting Tour with Local GuideTapas and wine with somebody who knows which bar does which single dish properly. Madrid eats at ten and this starts you off right.
Four walled cities sit inside ninety minutes of Atocha.
This is the thing Madrid does that no other Spanish city can. Toledo, Segovia, Ávila and El Escorial are all close enough to leave after breakfast and be back for a late dinner, and most coaches pair two of them into one day.
★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · Avila & Segovia Tour with Tickets to Monuments from Madrid
ToledoCathedral, synagogue and the Tagus gorge, half an hour down the line.
SegoviaA Roman aqueduct with no mortar in it, and a castle Disney borrowed from.
ÁvilaEleventh-century walls you can walk the whole way round.
El EscorialPhilip II’s granite monastery in the Guadarrama foothills.
90 day trips out of Madrid, priced and reviewed.
Every Toledo day out →Three world galleries and a palace, inside one mile of Madrid.
Every gallery and palace ticket →
The Prado, the Reina Sofía and the Thyssen stand within ten minutes of each other on one boulevard, and the Royal Palace is a short walk west. Timed entry runs all four, so the order you book them in decides the day.
Plain entry, or a guide who edits it down
The Prado hangs about 1,700 works and a first visit that tries for all of them ends badly. A guided run does Velazquez, Goya and Bosch in two hours; the plain ticket is a third of the price if you have read up.
The state rooms before the coaches
Three thousand rooms, a Tiepolo ceiling over the throne room and the only Stradivarius quartet on earth still kept together. It shuts without warning when the state uses it, so a fixed date beats a flexible one.
Guernica, and the floor around it
Picasso’s canvas is the reason people come and the sketches on the same floor are why they stay. The building is a converted eighteenth-century hospital with glass lifts bolted on the outside.
Six kinds of Madrid day, and the best one in each.
A tapas crawl through La Latina, a tablao in Huertas, the old Habsburg streets on foot, the Casa de Campo on two wheels, a paella you cooked yourself, and the lanes around Plaza Mayor.
Madrid gets going at the hour other capitals give up.
The tablaos run two and three shows a night, the terraces off Plaza Santa Ana stay full until two, and the Chocolatería San Ginés is still frying churros at six in the morning. Book the show; the rest of the night arranges itself.
What a day in Madrid actually costs.
Every tour and ticket on the site, grouped by price. Madrid is the cheapest big-museum city in western Europe and the numbers show it.
Gallery entry, the Habsburg-quarter walks, a tablao seat with a drink, and Toledo by coach if you skip the lunch.
- 1Tour Bernabéu Entry Ticketfrom $41
- 2Prado Museum Entry Ticketfrom $21
- 3“Emociones” Live Flamenco Performancefrom $34
Guided palace and Prado mornings, tapas and wine evenings, the two-city day trips, paella classes with the market run.
Private guides, the Ribera del Duero winery days and a balloon lifting off over Segovia at first light.
Three things you can only book from Madrid.
Stadium tours, balloon rides and old windmills exist elsewhere. This particular trophy room, this particular aqueduct at sunrise and the actual windmills from the book do not.
The Bernabéu
Fifteen European Cups sit in one room, which is more than any other club has won in total. The stadium reopened after a rebuild that added a retractable pitch stored in trays under the stands, and the tour walks the tunnel and the dressing room when there is no match. Matchdays close it, so check the fixture list before you pick a date.
- 1Tour Bernabéu Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 21,573 reviews
- 2Guided Tour of Bernabéu Stadium★★★★★★★★★★ 3.8 · 1,128 reviews
- 3Bernabeu Stadium & Real Madrid Museum Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 360 reviews
Sunrise over the aqueduct
Baskets lift from the fields outside Segovia around dawn, which is the only hour the air is still enough. From four hundred metres the Roman aqueduct reads as a line of arches walking into the town and the Alcázar sits on its spur at the far end. Transport from Madrid is usually an add-on, and flights cancel on wind rather than rain.
- 1Hot-Air Balloon Ride over Segovia with Optional Transport from Madrid★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 582 reviews
- 2Hot Air Balloon Flight Over Segovia or Toledo★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 507 reviews
- 3Hot Air Balloon over Segovia with Optional Transfers from Madrid★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 388 reviews
The windmills Quixote charged
Consuegra and Campo de Criptana still line their ridges with whitewashed mills, and Cervantes put the most famous scene in Spanish literature on exactly this horizon. Most days pair them with Toledo, which is the sensible way round: the mills are an hour of standing on a windy ridge, not an afternoon.
- 1Don Quixote de la Mancha Windmills & Toledo Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 254 reviews
- 2Tour of the Don Quixote Windmills of La Mancha and Toledo with Lunch★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 209 reviews
- 3Windmills of Don Quixote Wine Tour & Tasting from Madrid★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 85 reviews
Four Madrid bookings that will not wait.
Most of this city can be sorted from a terrace table the night before. These four run on timed entry, fixture lists and a weather window, none of which care when your flight lands.
- 01Royal Palace Expert Guided Tour with Skip-the-LineEntry is timed and the palace closes at no notice when the state uses it for a ceremony. A fixed date is the only way to be sure.
- 02Tour Bernabéu Entry TicketThe tour shuts on matchdays and for two days either side of a Champions League night. Check the fixture before you pick the slot.
- 03Prado Museum Entry TicketTimed slots, and the free evening window fills within minutes of opening. The paid morning slots are the ones with room in them.
- 04Hot-Air Balloon Ride over Segovia with Optional Transport from MadridBaskets go up at dawn or not at all, and each one carries a fixed number. A cancelled flight rebooks to another morning, which you may not have.
When the city hits forty, go under a roof or go north.
Madrid sits at 650 metres on a plateau with nothing between it and the sun. July and August afternoons run past 38 degrees and the streets empty between two and six. Locals have two answers: the air-conditioned galleries on the Paseo del Arte, or the Guadarrama, where the sierra is ten degrees cooler an hour up the road.
Vermouth at noon, tapas at ten, and a market in between.
Madrid grew up landlocked and still runs the best fish counters in Spain, because everything comes up the road overnight to Mercamadrid. Book the market walk before the heat, the class that ends as lunch, and the crawl that starts when the terraces fill.
Inside the M-30, and well beyond it
Habsburg Madrid, the art mile, then the coach to Toledo.
Old Madrid
Royal Palace
La Latina
The Prado
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