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In honor of Mom’s pending semisesquicentennial birthday, we decided to spend this past weekend in Madrid, the capital of Spain and third largest city in the European Union. We started our trip at the Barcelona Sants train station aboard the Alta Velocidad Española or AVE bound for Zaragoza then Madrid. As the name describes, the AVE is the Spanish high-speed train. The roughly 650 km (403 miles) trip only required a little less than 3 hours one-way (even with one stop!). We were indeed traveling at some very high speeds.

We arrived at the Madrid Atocha station and leisurely made our way to the older section of the station, opened since 1851 but remodeled in 1992 into a 4,000 sq m (43,000 sq ft) tropical garden. Given Mom’s love of all things botanical, this seemed like an appropriate first stop for our weekend sojourn. We toured the garden and Allita even found some bananas growing quietly among the other 260 different plant species from Asia, America and Australia.

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Our next stop was Parque del Buen Retiro (Buen Retiro Park), which was only a short walk north from the train station. Our plan for this lovely Saturday morning was to stroll through the park, visit the Palacio de Cristal (Crystal Palace), enjoy the lovely fountains and statues placed here and there among the gardens, and eventually enjoy a picnic by the pond, Estanque del Retiro. I’m delighted to announce that we were entirely successful and the tuna bocadillo that Allita and I shared was delicious.

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After lunch, we wandered down Paseo del Prado, past Puerta de Alcalá (photo album), Fuente de Cibeles (photo album), Fuente de Neptuno (photo album), El Casón del Buen Retiro (photo album), San Jerónimo el Real (photo album) and finally arrived at the Museo Nacional del Prado (Prado Museum). Mom chose to visit the Prado because it is the main national art museum in Spain. We saw works by Goya, El Greco, Rubens and Velázquez among many, many others. In total, we spent over 2 hours visiting the museum and, although we had barely scraped the surface of the works on display, we were exhausted. Really, we can only spend some much time repeatedly studying nudity and Christianity in one day. It was hotel time.

After a short nap in our lovely hotel, Hotel Mayor, located just off the Plaza Mayor and very near the Palacio Real de Madrid (Royal Palace), Allita and I decided to go for an evening stroll or paseo. Below are some of the sights we saw as we wandered in the dusk.

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Sunday morning, we enjoyed a slow start and made use of the 24/7 coffee and fruit bar along with our complimentary continental breakfast at the Hotel Mayor. Did I mention how great this place is?! Eventually, we wandered to the Metro Line 2 Sol stop at Puerto del Sol (photo album) and rode the train back to Banco de España, which is a short walk down Paseo del Prado to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum). This was the second museum on Mom’s list of “places to visit” in Madrid.

The Thyssen is currently showing a temporary exhibit titled “Los Impresionistas y la Fotografía” (Impressionists and Photography). In the nearly 5 hours that we visited this museum, we toured all three floors of the permanent collection, the Impressionists temporary exhibit and enjoyed a lovely lunch in the museum cafe. It was a fantastic day. We saw Picasso, Rembrandt, Rubens, Monet, Manet, Cézanne, Caravaggio, Corot, Renoir, Degas, van Gogh, Kirchner, Gris, and Dali to name a few. A very small sample of the many amazing works that we saw is in the Madrid photo album.

We returned to Barcelona in a little over 2 hours on a direct AVE from Madrid, even though there were 14 cars including cafeteria. Some of the countryside visible from my window is in the Madrid photo album. Mom and Allita both declared the weekend a resounding success. ¡Adios Madrid!