Hotels in Madrid

Madrid keeps Spain's best art within a fifteen-minute walk: the Prado, the Reina Sofía (Guernica lives here) and the Thyssen form a triangle you could spend a whole trip inside. The city's other talent is eating and drinking late — tapas crawls through La Latina on a Sunday, vermouth at noon, dinner at ten — and the Retiro park absorbs the hours in between.

It lacks Barcelona's beach and Gaudí postcard shots, and July temperatures regularly pass 35°C, but it feels more Spanish and less performed. Stay around Sol or the Barrio de las Letras to walk to the big three galleries, Malasaña for bars and independent shops, or Chamberí for a calmer, local-feeling base that's still two metro stops from the centre.