Who built it, and it was not the French
Older accounts call the palace an outstanding example of French classical architecture. It is Italian throughout, by Italians.
Filippo Juvarra, brought from Turin, produced the design and died in 1736 before anything was built. His pupil Giovanni Battista Sacchetti scaled the scheme down to this site and built it. Francesco Sabatini enlarged and finished it for Charles III, with Ventura Rodríguez also involved. Work ran from 1738, and Charles III was the first monarch to move in, in 1764. Alfonso XIII was the last to live here.
On size, one claim is worth correcting and one is worth not making. Older accounts say "second only to Versailles". The usual comparison runs the other way: at around 135,000 square metres of floor space the palace is larger than either Versailles or Buckingham Palace. But Caserta in Italy is larger again, so the common boast about Western Europe is not safe, and Patrimonio Nacional itself makes no superlative at all. Room counts in circulation range from fourteen hundred to over three thousand, so none is given here.
Inside
A fraction of the building is open, and it is still more than one visit absorbs. The route takes in the great staircase, the Throne Room with its Tiepolo ceiling, the Gasparini Room — the rococo chamber with the embroidered silk and stucco — the Porcelain Room, whose walls really are ceramic, and the banqueting hall.
- The Royal Armoury is included in the palace ticket and is one of the finest collections of its kind anywhere: the parade and battle armour of Charles V and Philip II, luxury arms made for the court, with some pieces going back to the thirteenth century. It lost material in both the Peninsular War and the Civil War, and has recently been comprehensively redisplayed, with the effect of its original nineteenth-century skylight restored.
- It does not contain instruments of torture. Older accounts claim it shows "medieval torture implements used in the Spanish Inquisition". There is no support for this anywhere, and it is not the sort of thing a dynastic armoury collects. The claim belongs to the fairground, not to this building.
- The Royal Pharmacy is a museum display of jars, stills and instruments. Older accounts say it is still in use and therefore closed during official functions. It is not in use.
- The Royal Library holds the palace's books and manuscripts, and older accounts dismiss it as no competitor to the Vatican, which is both true and beside the point.
- The Stradivari are the thing to seek out. Patrimonio Nacional calls them the Cuarteto Palatino — a quartet of instruments bought by Charles III in 1772, and described by their owner as the only quartet decorated by Stradivari that remains together. A "complete quintet" is widely claimed elsewhere; the collection's own custodian says quartet. They are still taken out and played.
- The Royal Kitchen opened to visitors on 17 October 2017 and no older account can mention it. It runs through the first basement — the pastry workshop, the great kitchen, the larders — with the equipment largely as renewed in the 1860s and 70s. Small timed groups only, on its own or combined ticket.
Outside, on the walls and in the gardens, are stone figures of Spanish kings and, among them, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, and Moctezuma — put up by a dynasty that counted the rulers it had deposed among its own predecessors. The Sabatini Gardens to the north and the Campo del Moro below to the west are both free.
The museum that opened in 2023
The single largest thing missing from any older account of Madrid. The Galería de las Colecciones Reales — the Royal Collections Gallery — opened in June 2023 on the promontory immediately south of the palace, after some twenty-five years from first competition to opening.
It is by Mansilla + Tuñón, and it is designed to be almost invisible: from the cathedral square it reads as a retaining wall, while on the far side it drops away in three stacked galleries with a long belvedere looking over the Casa de Campo to the Guadarrama. Inside, the top gallery covers the Trastámaras and Habsburgs, the middle one the Bourbons, and the lowest takes temporary exhibitions and carriages. Some six hundred and fifty objects are shown from royal holdings running to many tens of thousands — Bernini, Titian, Rubens, Velázquez, tapestries, armour, fans, coaches. Excavation also uncovered the wall of a ninth-century Muslim settlement, which is displayed where it was found.
It is a separate ticket from the palace, with a combined pass available, and it has its own free window.
The cathedral next door
Facing the palace across the Plaza de la Armería is Santa María la Real de la Almudena, Madrid's cathedral — a building the whole of any older account manages to ignore, and which has the most unusual history of any cathedral in Europe.
The first stone was laid in 1883. The crypt opened for worship in 1911, and then the work stopped for decades, resuming only after the Civil War. It was consecrated by Pope John Paul II on 15 June 1993 — which makes it, almost uniquely, a European cathedral dedicated by a reigning pope within living memory. The exterior is neoclassical so as not to argue with the palace; the interior is Gothic in plan but decorated in the late twentieth century, which is why it startles visitors expecting something medieval. There is a separate museum and a dome viewpoint.
Getting in
- Admission is charged and the Royal Armoury is included. The Royal Kitchen and the Royal Collections Gallery are charged separately.
- There is a substantial free window, on Monday to Thursday afternoons in the last two hours before closing, for citizens of EU and Latin American countries and for EU residents and permit holders, on production of identification. Self-guided only, tickets from the box office rather than online. The Royal Collections Gallery has its own equivalent window. The Royal Kitchen has none.
- Free to everyone on 18 May and 12 October. Several categories go free at any time, including under-fives, the registered unemployed and visitors with a recognised disability and a companion.
- It closes without notice for state events. This is explicit on the ticketing page and it is worth taking seriously, because the palace is a working seat of state.
- Shorter hours in winter than summer, and on Sundays. Closed on 1 and 6 January, 1 May and 25 December.
The changing of the guard
Two different things, both free.
- The routine relief happens on Wednesdays and Saturdays through the middle of the day at the Puerta del Príncipe on Calle Bailén, earlier in July and August.
- The solemn relief is the large one — mounted and on foot, about fifty minutes, in the Plaza de la Armería — nominally on the first Wednesday of the month at noon, and not at all in January, August or September.
Neither is reliable. The city's own tourism service warns that both can be cancelled for official engagements or weather, and the published dates do not always follow the first-Wednesday rule. Check the Royal Guard's own calendar before building a morning around it.
General practicalities for the city are on the Madrid page.