Shopping In Madrid - A Manual To The Historical City Of Spain

The Prado, The Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and the Thyssen Bornemisza museums are surrounded by lovely foliage, and only a short walking distance from each other. They are located at the lovely Paseo des Arte, which is in the Eastern part of city. It's a tranquil neighborhood with excellent restaurants and apartment buildings and several scruffier museums providing a background for the elegance and allure of the major three. The retiro gardens with its ponds, fountains, glass pavilions and flower gardens with blooming roses lie behind the Prado and is a decent area dipped in the shades of trees where a man can spend some cozy hours avoiding the tremendous heat of the summer.

Just West of the Paseo del Arte is the exhilarating barrio of Santa Ana with sloping lanes lined with tiled restaurants and tapas bars. Ever since the days of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, it's been known as a free-spirited, lively and unconventional place. In years past the theatres and brothels were in competition for customers. Today the theatres are a fun place to be in the evening when the sun goes down. The swarms of people fill the terraces surrounding the Plaza, jockeying for places to sit and standing room. It is less noisy during the daytime where the older locals lounge on benches and watch with amusement as the neighbourhood’s new population of trendy professionals take their fashionable dogs out for a stroll.

This wonderful looking plaza is the center of old Madrid. It is a vast and imposing square, once used to crown royalty, to burn heretics, and now, unfortunately, home to nothing more than plastic covered menus at grimy tourist cafes. The oldest streets in the city, are twisted, bent lanes that curve away from the square; these are the last echos of a city that used to be beautiful. Located on both sides with steeples, palaces, convents, and masterpiece shops that make ancestral guitars or sharpen knives, all seem to never age as the time goes by. To the east is the Palacio Real, a sight that must be seen.

These average blue collar neighbourhoods lie randomly under the Plaza Mayor. A great portion of the area is run down and poverty stricken though the brilliant marks of the efforts for the betterment of the same are visible everywhere. There is an international flavor to the cafes. Do not miss the popular Sunday morning flea market, El Rastro, and then a tapas crawl.

Dominating the northern part of the old city and connecting east and west, the Gran Via shows itself off as a wide avenue lined with extravagant, rustic cinemas, stores and banks. Two neighbourhoods north of Gran Via, Malasana and Chueca, have what could be called alter egos, during the day, they are quaint and comforting, but after sunset, the night life can get a little crazy. In the know shops and bars and the excuberant nightlife make such places the hippest areas in Madrid.

In the northeast section of the city, Swanky Salamanca is comprised of broad avenues containing chic apartments and fine restaurants. As soon as you spot the Ferraris, exclusive clubs and designer boutiques, it becomes obvious that money is in no short supply in Calle Serrano. Some of the nineteenth century mansions enhance the higher end surroundings, and the shiny towers that line Paseo Castellano are a wonderful point of interest for those intrigued by modern building design.