Madrid

Madrid has been the capital of Spain since 1561, when Philip II moved his court here — so rather longer than the four hundred years older accounts give it, and long enough that the city's whole shape is the consequence of that one decision. It was a modest town on a plateau with no river worth the name, chosen partly because it sat in the middle.

What it has now is three of the great art collections of Europe within a few hundred metres of each other, a Habsburg square, a Bourbon palace, and a park that has been public since the nineteenth century. What it also has, increasingly, is heat: the summers are no longer merely hot, and that is now the first thing to plan around.

When to go, and why summer is now the question

This has changed more than anything else on this page, and it is not a matter of a degree or two.

Summer 2026 was the warmest in Spain since at least 1869. It brought four heatwaves, of eight, twenty-three, twenty-four and five days, with another in early September. The summer before that was the hottest on record at the Retiro weather station, whose series begins in 1920, with fifty-four nights that never dropped below twenty degrees. The national forecaster's own summary of 2026 was that summer-like conditions lasted about four months rather than three. Every one of the ten warmest Spanish summers on record has happened this century.

The practical consequences for a visit:

  • July and August are genuinely hard, and the nights do not cool. Madrileños who can leave do leave, and some businesses close.
  • The city now runs a formal heat programme. Air-conditioned municipal markets open as public cooling shelters, senior centres open daily as shelters through July and August, water misting runs at several points, the drinking fountains are maintained as a network, and there are shade awnings over the Puerta del Sol in summer. The museums are the obvious refuge and the city promotes them as such.
  • The best months are May, June, September and October — and on the recent record, late September and October are the safer bet, because the heat now starts in mid-May and June has been running well above its old averages. April and October give the mildest afternoons.

Arriving

The airport's full name is Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas — the politician's name comes first, by an order of 2014 — though Madrid-Barajas remains ordinary shorthand and the airport itself still uses it.

  • Metro line 8 serves both airport stations, T1-T2-T3 and T4, and runs to Nuevos Ministerios, where a change is needed for the centre. Accounts that say it serves only T4 are wrong.
  • The Cercanías train, line C-1, serves T4 only, and runs to Chamartín and Atocha, which makes it the route to take for a long-distance or high-speed connection. It is free with an onward high-speed ticket.
  • The Exprés Aeropuerto, bus 203, runs twenty-four hours a day. By day it goes to Atocha by way of Cibeles; overnight it stops at Cibeles. A bank card or phone is accepted on board with no surcharge. The tourist travel pass is not valid on it, which catches people out.
  • Two ordinary city buses also serve the airport — the 200 to the Avenida de América interchange and the 101 to Canillejas — at the normal city fare, and these are covered by the tourist pass. Almost no guidebook mentions them.
  • The metro charges an airport supplement on single and ten-journey tickets. The tourist pass includes it.

One recent change a traveller will notice: the new central security area at T4 is now fully open, with scanners that let liquids and electronics stay in hand luggage. A very large expansion of the whole airport is under way through the end of the decade.

Tickets, and something new

Since 1 June 2026 an ordinary contactless bank card, phone or watch can be tapped at the metro gates, across all three hundred-odd stations, with no need to buy a transport card first. This is the single most useful change for a short visit and no older account can mention it.

Two honest limits. It covers single journeys only — travel passes still need the physical card — and not every gate is enabled, though each station has at least two that are. It applies to the metro rather than the wider bus network, where card payment is confirmed on the airport express and still being worked out elsewhere. Worth checking the operator's own site before relying on it.

Otherwise:

  • The Tarjeta Transporte Público Multi is the standard card — contactless, transferable, not personal, valid ten years, sold at metro machines and tobacconists and loadable with singles, ten-journey tickets or tourist passes.
  • The tourist travel pass comes in two zones. Zone A covers the city: all metro, all city buses except the airport express, and Cercanías within the zone. Zone T covers the whole region, including the interurban buses to Toledo and Guadalajara and the entire Cercanías network — though not the high-speed or regional trains to those places. Sold for one to seven consecutive days, valid from first use rather than purchase, and it includes the airport supplement.

The metro, which is bigger than the city warrants

Twelve numbered lines and a short branch, more than three hundred stations and some two hundred and ninety-five kilometres of route, in a city of around three and a quarter million people. The regional tourism authority puts it third in Europe after Moscow and London, and around eighth in the world. It opened in 1919.

Work in progress that is visible to a visitor: line 6, the circular, is being automated, with platform screen doors going in across all its stations; line 11 is being extended across the south of the city; and line 5 is being extended to the airport's T1-T2-T3, due later this decade.

Driving, and the trap

This is the part that can ruin a trip, and no account written before 2021 mentions any of it.

There is no single low-emission zone. There are three, nested. "Madrid 360" is the name of the city's environmental strategy, not of a zone.

  • The whole municipality has been a low-emission zone since the start of 2024, barring vehicles with no Spanish environmental label — broadly petrol cars registered before 2000 and diesels before 2006.
  • The Distrito Centro zone, the successor to the old Madrid Central, covers most of the central district and is camera-enforced.
  • A third zone covers Plaza Elíptica in the south.

The rule that surprises people: in the central zone a car with a B or C label — which a Spanish hire car very probably has — may enter only in order to park in a car park, a private garage or a reserved space. It may not drive in and look for a kerbside space. Only the cleanest categories may circulate and park freely.

For a British-registered car the position is stricter still. A foreign plate carries no Spanish environmental label, and the traffic authority cannot issue one; the United Kingdom has no equivalent national scheme, so there is no reciprocal recognition either. What is required is to apply in advance to the central zone's own office, sending the vehicle's technical data sheet and registration documents, so that an equivalent label can be assigned. Without it the car is treated as having no label at all, which bars it not just from the centre but from the entire municipality.

Madrid has no day permit and no visitor pass — Barcelona has a register for foreign vehicles, Madrid does not, and the two should not be confused. Fines are classed as a serious traffic offence, reduced for prompt payment, and can now be pursued across borders including to the United Kingdom. Enforcement against foreign plates has been patchy, because the cameras lack emissions data for them, but it is tightening, and the police can stop and fine regardless of cameras.

The short version: do not drive into central Madrid. The metro goes everywhere and the centre is walkable.

Two things Madrid does not do

  • There is no tourist tax. Proposals come up regularly — twice in 2026 alone — and have been rejected by both the city council and the regional government, most recently in July 2026. This is a real difference from Barcelona and it may not last, but it is the position.
  • Tourist flats have been restricted rather than abolished. Under a plan finally approved in August 2025, flats scattered among homes in the historic centre are no longer permitted, and converting commercial premises to tourist use there is barred; outside the centre, tourist accommodation needs a whole building or independent street access. Madrid has since recorded the largest fall in tourist flats of any Spanish city. Barcelona is abolishing the category outright; Madrid is not.

Bullfighting, stated plainly

Older accounts recommend "first-rate bullfights" as an attraction without qualification. It is legal in Madrid and the ring at Las Ventas is the most important in the world for the form, with the main season running from spring to autumn and the San Isidro festival in May. It is also strongly contested within Spain: it is banned in the Canary Islands, has been the subject of long legal and political fights elsewhere, and public opinion has moved against it, particularly among the young. A visitor should decide knowing both of those things rather than only the first.

What has arrived since

  • The Galería de las Colecciones Reales, the Royal Collections Gallery, opened in June 2023 beside the Palacio Real after twenty-five years in the making. It is the single biggest addition to the city's museums in a generation and the largest gap in any older account.
  • Madrid Río. The inner ring motorway was buried along the Manzanares between 2003 and 2007 and a linear park built over it — about a hundred and twenty hectares along ten kilometres of river. The final stretch was only inaugurated in December 2024, so even recent accounts describe it as unfinished.
  • The Parque Atlético de Madrid, on the site of the demolished Vicente Calderón stadium, opened in December 2024 and joins the two halves of Madrid Río.
  • Galería Canalejas, a luxury shopping gallery a few steps from the Puerta del Sol, opened in 2022 in a complex that also holds a hotel — creating a second luxury pole in the historic centre, away from Salamanca.
  • The Santiago Bernabéu has been rebuilt, with a retractable roof, and can be toured almost every day. Atlético left the Calderón in 2017 for the stadium on the old Peineta site, usually just called the Metropolitano — its sponsored name has changed three times.
  • The Mercado de San Miguel reopened in February 2026 after three years of structural work.

World Heritage, with the scope stated correctly

In 2021 UNESCO inscribed "Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of Arts and Sciences". It is worth being precise about what that covers, because it is widely misreported.

The inscription is of an urban landscape: the tree-lined Paseo del Prado with its Apollo, Neptune and Cibeles fountains, the Buen Retiro gardens, the Royal Botanical Garden, and the surrounding Jerónimos quarter with its buildings given to the arts and sciences. It is not an inscription of the three art museums, and it is not an inscription of the "Paseo del Arte", which is the name of the combined museum ticket. The city promotes the inscribed area as the Paisaje de la Luz, the Landscape of Light — a different label again.

The pages below

The three great collections

A combined ticket, the Paseo del Arte, covers one visit to each within a year of purchase.

The old city and the court

Parks, books and shops

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