Madrid Community
Discover Madrid Community
Introduction
The Community of Madrid is a small autonomous region in the geographical centre of Spain, almost entirely taken up by its capital and the mountains behind it. Madrid sits at around six hundred and fifty metres, which makes it the highest major capital in Europe and explains a climate of hard, clear winters and summers hot enough to empty the city in August.
Three museums within a few hundred metres of each other hold as concentrated a collection of European painting as exists anywhere: the Prado for Velázquez, Goya and Bosch, the Reina Sofía for Guernica, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza for everything in between. The boulevard that links them and the Retiro park beside it are together a UNESCO World Heritage site. Away from the museums the city is a street city — the great arcaded square at its centre, the tiled taverns, a dinner hour that starts at ten and a night that runs past dawn.
Three more World Heritage sites sit within an hour. El Escorial is Philip II’s vast granite monastery-palace under the sierra; Alcalá de Henares is a planned university town and Cervantes’s birthplace; and Aranjuez is a royal summer palace with gardens along the Tagus. Behind them the Sierra de Guadarrama national park offers pine forest, granite peaks and winter snow forty minutes from the centre.