Mon Aug 12 We flew to Madrid from Vienna, arriving around 8pm. We took the metro to the Hotel Mediodia which was a short walk from the station and in a very good location for our touring. Our window looked out on the Reina Sofia Museum and the Prado Museum was within walking distance. There were lots of restaurants and a market in our block -all very convenient. The first night we ate at a restaurant with outdoor seating (it was a warm evening) just a few steps from our hotel –appeared to be a greasy spoon but we were pleasantly surprised. We both ordered their paella and were told it would take a minimum of 20 minutes, which was fine as we had nothing else to do but go back to the hotel. Our waiter seemed a little gruff to us at first but he was very attentive. While we waited for the paella, we had a couple of tapas. The entire meal was so much better than we expected, we were all smiles throughout the night. That might be why our waiter delivered a bottle of Spanish wine to our table –compliments of the chef! We promised to return for more meals and we did.

Tues Aug 13 We took the metro over to a bicycle rental shop where we arranged for a night bicycle tour of Madrid (9-11 pm). If you booked a tour, you could rent the bikes for additional time at a reduced rate, so we rented them for 2 hours that morning and did a self-guided tour. Our first stop was the nearby Retiro Park, but enroute we saw the beautiful and very large Alcala gate. The story of the gate according to Wikipedia is “Madrid in the late 18th century, still remained a somewhat drab villa in appearance, surrounded by medieval walls. Around the year 1774, king Charles III commissioned Francesco Sabatini to construct a monumental gate in the city wall through which an expanded road to the city of Alcalá was to pass, replacing an older, smaller, gate which stood nearby.” Retiro Park is huge, perfect for a bicycle tour, and definitely used by the residents. There are many shaded paths with bicycles, walkers, and runners. There is an exercise equipment area, several artificial lakes, fountains, rose garden, beautifully sculpted trees, army museum, and several plazas. The "Paseo de la Argentina", also popularly known as the Statue Walk ("Paseo de las Estatuas"), is decorated with some of the statues of kings from the Royal Palace, sculpted between 1750 and 1753. At the edge of one of the smaller lakes is a beautiful glass building, the Palacio de Cristal. Built in 1887, it was initially used to house exotic plants. It is now mainly used for temporary exhibitions and while we were there it housed “The Cultures of the Bedouin Tent”. There was an enormous Arab tent constructed of beautiful textiles within the glass palace. The artist, Federico Guzman is from Seville. In the southwest corner of the park is the Bosque del Recuerdo, Memorial Forest. It commemorates the 191 victims of terrorism who lost their lives in the March 11, 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid. Peacocks wandered in one area of the park. Ducks and turtles swam in the lakes with birds flying above. You could rent a rowboat on the largest lake. Definitely a must-see if you are in Madrid.

After we dragged ourselves away from the park, we rode by the Palacio de Cibeles. It was hard to believe that it was originally built as the headquarters of the Post Office of Madrid, as it indeed looks like a palace. It became the Madrid City Hall in 2007. In the Plaza Cibeles there is the famous fountain of Cibeles, sculpted in 1782, from a design by Ventura Rodríguez. It is a beautiful marble sculpture that has become an iconic symbol for the city of Madrid. This fountain, named after Cybele (or Ceres -the Roman goddess of nature), depicts the goddess sitting on a chariot pulled by two lions. In the Plaza de la Lealtad we saw Madrid’s tomb of the unknown soldier. It is built on the spot where many Spaniards were executed after the Dos de Mayo Uprising of 1808 (opposing Napolean and French occupation) and was re-inaugurated in 1985 as a memorial to all those who gave their life for Spain.

We returned the bikes after two hours and continued to tour on foot, heading back towards our hotel. The Royal Palace is the official residence of the Spanish Royal Family but is only used for state ceremonies. It is the largest palace in Europe by floor area. We did not tour the interior of the Palace, but wandered through the surrounding plazas. Bordered on three sides by the palace, Plaza de la Armeria is a huge open plaza suitable for military and festive parades. On the fourth side of this plaza sits the Almudena Cathedral. When the capital of Spain was moved from Toledo to Madrid (1561), Madrid did not have a cathedral and this needed to be rectified. But since it, of course, needed to be the biggest cathedral the world had ever seen, construction didn’t begin until 1879. Construction was halted during the Spanish Civil War and the project was abandoned until 1950. It was finally completed in 1993. Twentieth century construction costs being what they were, the design was modified and they don’t currently claim that it is indeed the largest but it’s pretty darn big. Plaza de Oriente is a park with several gardens and a row of statues, popularly known as the Gothic kings -sculptures representing five Visigoth rulers and fifteen rulers of the early Christian kingdoms in the Reconquista (period when Christian armies reclaimed control of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors). They are carved from limestone, and are part of a series dedicated to all monarchs of Spain. More of the statues in this series are in the Sabatini Gardens which as part of the palace tour we did not do. Jardines del Campo de Moro (Garden of the Moors Country) is behind the palace and we walked a long way around the walled perimeter of the gardens and had almost given up hope of finding an open entrance. We enjoyed a walk through these gardens with the big shade trees and the dramatic view of the palace along the Paseo Principal – a very long corridor of grass. The garden was on a slope and our walk took us switch-backing up the slope. Reviewing a map of the garden, we purposely walked towards a far corner of the gardens which was near a metro stop only to find that that gate was for palace staff only. The guard was quite insistent and not moved by our pleas to exit the park from there. So we got to revisit the gardens downhill as we returned to our original entrance. As we exited we noticed a guard had taken up a position at that entrance too, so perhaps we got away with a freebie. Fortunately there was another metro station not far from where we finally exited and we took it back to the hotel and relaxed a bit before dinner and our night bike tour.

The night tour is timed to start at sunset. We were the only ones doing the tour that night so we had the undivided attention of our guide –a nice young man who owned the bicycle shop. Normally he has his colleague do the English tours and he kept apologizing for his English –but it was very good and quite understandable. The trip started out with a sprint to a viewing spot for the sunset about 15 minutes away (yes, the sun didn’t set until 9:15); which was followed by a more leisurely cycle through town. With just the three of us in the group we were able to see so much and our guide added little side trips along the way to areas that were mentioned in the discussions. One of the highlights was the Templo de Debod, an ancient Egyptian temple which was dismantled and reassembled in Madrid (1969-1970). The Templo de Debod, built in the 4th century, once stood in the Nile Valley of Egypt, 31km (19 miles) from Aswan. When the new Aswan Dam threatened to submerge the temple, the Egyptian government decided to give it to Spain in gratitude for its help in saving Abu Simbel. (Wikipedia: The salvage of the Abu Simbel temples began in 1964, and cost some USD $80 million. Between 1964 and 1968, the entire site was cut into large blocks, dismantled and reassembled in a new location – 65 m higher and 200 m back from the river, in what many consider one of the greatest feats of archaeological engineering.) The tour guide commented that the cost to Spain for transporting and reconstructing the temple makes them wonder how much of a ‘gift’ it was. He also mentioned that the disassembly was not as careful as it should have been, so the re-assembly did not go so well and several blocks were lost or misplaced.

We rode through Plaza de Espana with a large stone monument to Cervantes which overlooks a bronze statue of Don Quixote. We stood on the “origin point” from which all road kilometer markings are measured in Spain. We saw the Congreso de los Diputados, an ornate renaissance building which houses Spain’s lower house of parliament where two large lions (made from smelted cannon balls) stand guard. Seeing the elegant buildings like this and the Palacio de Cibeles (city hall) lit up at night was a special treat. And it was so pleasant to bike around in the cool evening air. Actually the entire day had been in the low eighties and we asked our guide if this was normal for this time of year –knowing we had just come from mid-90’s in Vienna. He said it was very unusual and we were quite lucky as it is often in the 100’s in August.

Wed Aug 14 was our day to see the museums. We gave ourselves a break from the camera this day so no photos of the paintings in the gallery of these three museums. We walked to the Museo Nacional del Prado, which is quite famous and first on our list. We especially searched out some of the Spanish masters: Picasso, Goya, Dali, Velasquez, and El Greco. But we certainly browsed other areas of the museum and hours flew by. We spent some time wandering down the Paseo del Prado (Madrid’s main street), enjoying the various plazas with their fountains and monuments.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia houses more modern art (20th century) and was right next door to us. We could see the front of the museum with its two outdoor glass-sided elevators from our window. This night it had free entrance so we watched out our window until the line of waiting visitors disappeared into the museum and then wandered down. We specifically wanted to see Picasso’s Guernica, considered the most famous masterpiece in the museum. Wikipedia: “Guernica is a mural-sized oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso completed by June 1937. The painting, which uses a palette of gray, black, and white, is known as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history.” It was painted as a reaction to the Nazi's bombing practice on the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

We decided to go in search of churros with hot chocolate, a Madrid specialty that a friend told us not to miss. We had asked our bike tour guide about locations that serve this delicacy and he had taken us by the most popular such establishment. It was a bit of a walk and as we got in the same neighborhood we saw others serving the churros and decided to stop as it was almost 10pm – glad we did as it was indeed closing at 10:00. The hot chocolate is not something we could drink –it was very thick, rich chocolate which could only be used for dipping. Quite a different taste from the ones we get in Santa Barbara at Fiesta which are rolled in cinnamon sugar.


Thu Aug 15 Our flight to Lisbon was at about 3:00pm so we didn’t need to be at the airport until 1pm. We checked out and placed our bags in the hotel storage room. We hadn’t had the opportunity to drink our bottle of Spanish wine, so we gave it to the staff at the hotel –they had been very helpful in finding our way around Madrid. We took the metro back to the center of town for a few hours of people-watching and lunch. Returning to the hotel to collect our bags and head for the airport we finally identified the Atocha Railroad Station after passing it each day –we could see it from the front of our hotel and we wanted to explore, but didn’t make it over there. The trip to the airport was uneventful and our flight to Lisbon left on time.