Madrid in 3 days: Europe's highest capital city where dinner at midnight is normal, the Golden Triangle of Art holds three of the world's finest museums in one walk, and churros for breakfast at 6am is a tradition that goes back 130 years.
The world's greatest Spanish painting collection: Velázquez's painting-about-painting and Bosch's hallucinatory triptych in the same museum.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideBroken eggs over crispy Galician potatoes: the dish that feeds the King of Spain and every prime minister since Franco.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuide350 acres of royal park: Palacio de Cristal (free Reina Sofía exhibitions), 4,000 rose bushes and the city's soul.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideCava Baja: cockles in Manzanilla, calamares fritos and the 1879 bullfighter bar with tiles still on the walls.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuide24-hour Madrid institution: madrileños come here at 6am after a night out and at 9am before the museums. The chocolate is genuinely liquid.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe most powerful political painting ever made: Picasso's 1937 response to the Nazi bombing of a Basque town. Room 206.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuide1916 iron-and-glass market beside Plaza Mayor: stand-up tapas lunch among vermouth and Cantabrian anchovies.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideRoast suckling pig in the cellar where Goya worked as a waiter and Hemingway wrote. Dinner at 10:30pm is normal.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideEurope's largest open-air flea market: antiques, vintage records, ceramics and everything else, 9–2pm Sunday.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideVermouth, boquerones and anchovies after the market: the most madrileño hour of the most madrileño day.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe largest royal palace in Western Europe: the only 5 Stradivarius instruments still played together as a set, in the same room.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideWhere Ramón Gómez de la Serna held his literary table every Friday for 50 years: completely unchanged since 1888.