Where to Stay in Madrid, Comunidad de Madrid

What is Madrid known for?

Madrid is known as the capital and largest city of Spain, a centre of art, government, and national life. The city holds some of the finest art collections anywhere, among them the Museo del Prado, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. The Prado anchors it all.

Grand avenues and squares open out from the old core, past the Royal Palace of Madrid and the green expanse of El Retiro Park, on ground set high across the central Iberian Peninsula. The capital carries both.

What are the main landmarks in Madrid?

Madrid centres its landmarks on the Museo del Prado, one of the world's foremost picture galleries. The Prado leads a chain of museums that includes the Museo Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, while the Royal Palace of Madrid and the Teatro Real anchor the old court district. Green space matters too.

El Retiro Park and the Real Botanic Garden of Madrid open up beside the museums, and the small stone Temple of Debod looks out from the edge of the old centre. The city wears its history in stone.

What is the history of Madrid?

Madrid took shape as a settlement on the River Manzanares, its recorded founding placed in 1083, high on the plains of the central Iberian Peninsula. For its early centuries it was a modest inland town, one of many on the interior, with little to mark it out. Then the crown arrived.

Chosen as the seat of the Spanish court, Madrid rose from a provincial town into the capital of Spain, and its fortunes have followed the state ever since. Power made the city. As the capital, Madrid gathered the institutions, palaces, and collections of a great state around it.

The Royal Palace of Madrid rose as the seat of the court, and grand museums such as the Museo del Prado grew into the pillars of the city's cultural life. Avenues and squares were laid out on a scale to match. Through Spain's long and often turbulent history, the capital stayed the country's political, economic, and cultural centre, drawing people and power inward from across the peninsula.

The city still carries that layered past in its palaces, parks, and galleries, a capital built up over centuries beside the Manzanares.

Where is Madrid?

Madrid stands high on the plains of the central Iberian Peninsula, on the River Manzanares. The city sits well inland, far from any coast, on ground raised above the surrounding country of the interior. Altitude marks it out.

As the capital of both Spain and the surrounding Comunidad de Madrid, it lies near the geographic middle of the country, set within the wider community it names.

What is Madrid like?

Madrid feels like a capital built for the street, its life spilling into plazas, terraces, and long evenings. The city runs on art and sociability, from the galleries of the Museo del Prado to a nightlife that stretches toward dawn. Spanish is the language of it all.

Around the Royal Palace of Madrid and El Retiro Park, the grand and the everyday sit close together, and the pace holds late into the night across the Spanish capital.

What is the climate of Madrid?

Madrid has the dry, continental climate of the high inland interior. Summers run hot and bright under a clear sky, while winters turn cold, the city's altitude sharpening both ends of the year. The River Manzanares crosses the city.

Standing far from any sea on the central Iberian Peninsula, Madrid feels little softening from the coast, and its air stays dry through much of the year.

How do you get to Madrid?

Madrid, as the capital of Spain, is the country's chief point of arrival. Air, rail, and road routes reach the city from across the Iberian Peninsula, converging on a capital that sits near the middle of the country. Madrid's old core is tightly drawn.

Once in Madrid, the Museo del Prado, the Royal Palace of Madrid, and El Retiro Park stand close together, an old core small enough to cross on foot.