City guide
Spain's least postcard-friendly great city: three world-class galleries, the best bar culture in Europe, and no beach to distract you.
Spain5 min readUpdated August 15, 2026
Madrid does not photograph as well as Barcelona and does not care. It is a city built for evenings, where the entire population goes outside at nine and stays there, and where you eat standing up in four different places rather than sitting down in one.
It is also flat, walkable and compact in a way that surprises people expecting a capital. Almost everything below sits inside a forty-minute walk of everything else.
The correct Madrid evening is four bars and one dish in each. Ordering everything in one place is how visitors eat and how they miss the point.
La Latina
Deboned fried cod in batter, and effectively nothing else. Order at the bar, stand where you can, and do not ask for a table.
Local tip: Cash. Closed Sunday evenings and most of August.
One dish, no menu, no seats worth having, forty years of queue.
Malasaña
An 1892 tavern with vermouth on tap and a tortilla that regularly wins arguments about the best in the city. Narrow, loud, correct.
Chamartín
A bistro that chefs go to on their night off, half hidden below street level. Traditional Spanish cooking with no interest in trends whatsoever.
Ask the concierge to book thisLa Latina
A working market rather than a food court, with a couple of bars inside where the fishmongers drink. The anti-San-Miguel.
Malasaña and Chueca for going out, Las Letras for walking to the galleries, Salamanca if you want quiet and do not mind paying for it.
Salamanca
A 19th-century palace with a genuinely quiet garden, in the smartest part of the city. Formal in a way that suits Madrid.
Ask the concierge to book thisA garden in the middle of Salamanca, which nobody expects.
Cheap, well-run rooms two minutes from Plaza Mayor with a rooftop bar that stays busy. The best value in the centre by a distance.
Ask the concierge to book thisLa Latina
Comfortable and central, walking distance to all three big galleries and the Retiro. Unremarkable in the good way.
Ask the concierge to book thisLas Letras
The three galleries sit within a ten-minute walk of each other. Doing two of them well is a much better day than doing all three at speed.
Las Letras
Velázquez, Goya and Bosch in quantities that are difficult to believe. Las Meninas alone justifies the trip, and Goya's black paintings will follow you home.
Local tip: Free for the last two hours daily, which is exactly when everyone else goes. Pay and go at opening instead.
Atocha
Modern Spanish art in a converted hospital, built around Guernica. The room it hangs in is usually silent, which tells you something.
Retiro
The city's front garden: rowing boats, a glass palace, and half of Madrid outside on any Sunday. Free and enormous.
Moncloa
An actual Egyptian temple, given to Spain in 1968 and rebuilt on a hill facing west. The best free sunset in the city, and everyone knows it.
Castile is flat, dry and full of walled towns. All three of these are under an hour by train.
Philip II's monastery-palace, austere on a scale that is almost intimidating, in the hills where Madrid goes to escape the heat.
palace · half day
Ask the concierge to book thisA Roman aqueduct standing in the middle of town without mortar, a fairytale castle, and roast suckling pig as the local speciality.
roman · food · full day
Ask the concierge to book thisA fortified city on a rock in a river bend, where Christian, Jewish and Muslim Spain overlapped for centuries and left the buildings to prove it. Thirty-three minutes by train.
history · full day
Local tip: Stay for the evening. The day-trippers leave at five and the town becomes a different place.
Ask the concierge to book thisEverything above, on one map. Colours mark what kind of place it is; tap a dot and its details open beside the map, and you keep your place. Day trips are left off, they sit well outside the city.
Pin positions are approximate: neighbourhood level, not street addresses.
Forty degrees, and much of the city closes and goes to the coast. Beautiful if you want empty streets, difficult if you want dinner.
Restaurants that open at 8 are for tourists. Have a drink and a plate at 8, then eat properly at 10 like everyone else.
Free entry at the Prado and Reina Sofía means queues around the block and rooms you cannot move in. Pay.
The bars in this guide do not take bookings and the galleries sell timed tickets that go quickly. If you want a table at Sacha, gallery slots that do not clash, or a car to Toledo for the evening, message the Simly concierge.
Message the conciergeEverything in this guide assumes a working phone: maps between neighbourhoods that follow no grid, ride-hailing instead of flagging taxis, a menu handwritten in Arabic. A Simly eSIM activates before you land, so you step off the plane already connected.
Get a Simly eSIMMadrid, Spain
