Madrid: Prado and Beranbéu

There are numerous landmarks in Madrid that you can visit, and I tried to visit as many as I could, but in the online guidebook that I used didn’t even mention the one in which I was most interested as a “Top Ten Sight.” That, of course, is Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, home of Real Madrid.

I missed the match the night before, but I had read that the Bernabéu was open to visitors, allowing you to visit the pitch, the royal box, the dressing room, et al. It sounded like a great experience, so on Monday morning, I hopped on the Metro and went to the stadium. When I got there, I saw that for a few additional Euros, you could get a guided tour in Spanish or English. The next one started at noon, and it was around eleven, so I decided to go for the guided tour and kill time by walking around the neighborhood.

When the time came for my tour, I entered the stadium and waited for my group. They never arrived. At noon, my guide showed up. She told me that I was the only person who signed up for the noon tour in either Spanish or English, so I was going to get a personal tour of the stadium. That rocked!!!

The tour itself was very interesting. I’m sure that it would have been more interesting had I been a Real Madrid supporter, but the history of the place is tremendous, nonetheless. My guide realized that I wasn’t a Real Madrid fan because she noticed that I wasn’t stopping to have my picture taken everywhere, though I did have a few. The best parts of the tour, at least for me, was the tour of the trophy rooms for both football and basketball, and the pitch. I had pictures taken in both of those, as well as in the football equivalent of the dugout. My guide was very nice and the tour was about 75% in English and 25% in Spanish. I really need to practice more Spanish. All-in-all, the tour took about an hour.

After lunch, I took a long walk along the Gran Via. The Gran Via is the most famous street of Madrid. It was built a hundred years ago and architects kept trying to outdo each other with the buildings that were built all along the street. There are a lot of beautiful early-20^th century buildings, and of course, art deco. There are also many upscale stores and cinemas along the way. There also many statues, including one that was pointed out to me as the statue in which all of the Real Madrid supporters gather whenever they win something significant like La Liga’s Primera Division or a Champions League trophy. (It’s been a few years since there’s been any such gathering.)

For dinner on Monday night, I decided that I wanted to try a few things, so I went to a little tapas place not too far from my hotel. It wasn’t the fanciest of places but it did the trick. I tried the Jamon Serrano, a potato dish with a garlic cream sauce and some fried chorizo with cheese. You don’t really need to know me too well to know that the fried chorizo with cheese was my favorite.

My main goal on Tuesday morning was to visit El Museo Nacional del Prado. Everything that I had read about Madrid said that this is the highlight of any trip to Madrid and it didn’t disappoint. It is an art museum in central Madrid. I did not find the outside of the structure to be as imposing as I had expected, but that didn’t take away from what I found inside. There were works of Goya, Raphael, Dutch and Flemish masters as well as many others, primarily from the 14^th – 17^th centuries. There also were rooms devoted to sculptures. I used an audio guide (only 3.5 Euros) and found myself spending much more time listening to stories about the paintings and artists than I anticipated.

Adjacent, or close to adjacent, to Prado are the Royal Botanical Gardens and Buen Retiro Park. Since this is already about as long as I like any of my posts to be, I’ll pick up at Buen Retiro Park in my next entry.