Artists of every kind make all of Madrid a stage. From
footballers on the playing field to painters in world-renowned museums, and
from buskers and flamenco dancers to cooks preparing haute or homely cuisine,
visitors will find the Spanish capital a hotbed of talent waiting to be
discovered.
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| Cristiano Ronaldo scores the equaliser in the 1-1 match against Athletic Bilbao |
It’s a balmy Wednesday night in April, and 59,000 football
fans are swarming out of the Santiago Bernabeu, where Real Madrid have just
drawn 1-1 with Athletic Bilbao. On a traffic island in front of the stadium’s
main entrance a digital display shows the temperature is 17C and the hour
23.02. Time for dinner. In a city where long, leisurely lunches often last
beyond five o’clock and the evening meal rarely starts before half-past nine,
eating late is the norm.
A 12-minute ride on the Metro from Santiago Bernabeu takes me
to Plaza España, where my hotel is located. I squeeze through the throng into a
nearby bar bunged with disappointed Real supporters. The result has left a sour
taste in their mouths - they expected an easy win - and they’re doing their
best to wash it away with glasses of Madrid brew Mahou, the best lager in
Spain.
The kitchen is working overtime turning out tapas and the
noise is off the scale. Customers bawl their orders at the barmen, who
acknowledge them with a bellow. The floor is a debris field of discarded
serviettes, toothpicks, prawn shells and olive pips, but every five minutes a
boy with a broom clears it all away. In a lacklustre match the Real and
Athletic sweepers did little of note, but this kid is playing a blinder.
All eyes are on the TV. In the studio, the football pundits
are giving their considered analyses of the game. In the bar, the fans are
giving them dog’s abuse. It’s great fun - cursing in Spanish is colourful and
not a little cringe-inducing - but it’s nearly 1am and time for bed. The bill
for three bottles of Mahou and a plate each of Serrano ham, Manchego cheese and
potato omelette comes to €16.50. That’s what you call a result.
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| The Royal Palace, where the best buskers in Madrid entertain delighted crowds |
At midday in front of the palace, tourists gather around
street musicians. These aren’t any old buskers: as befits the regal backdrop,
they’re the best in town and have had to audition to earn a city hall permit
and a coveted performance spot.
An elderly gentleman in a pristine cream suit and Panama hat,
looking every inch the man from Del Monte, plays Glenn Miller favourites on a
clarinet. When he follows Moonlight Serenade with Little Brown Jug, a
middle-aged American couple can’t contain themselves and start jiving like
professionals.
A teenage girl with an acoustic guitar and a mane of natural
red hair - a much-admired rarity in Spain - enchants her audience with the
haunting second movement of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the most beautiful
composition for guitar that was ever written. When she finally takes a bashful
bow, coins rain into her instrument case.
The Golden Buzzer, however, goes to the man playing movie
themes on an array of stemless brandy bowls and champagne flutes stuck with
putty to a trestle table. Dipping his fingertips into a flask of water at his
hip, he runs them around the rims and the Titanic signature tune fills the air.
He must dread the day when a mezzo-soprano sets up nearby and hits a
glass-shattering high C.
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| This talented street musician is the top draw in front of the Royal Palace |
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| Cork-born Tony O'Connor in Puerta del Sol |
It’s a 20-minute walk to Plaza de la Puerta del Sol, which
has its street entertainers too, and among them is a man dressed as Charlie
Chaplin’s little tramp character, known in Spain as Charlot. At his feet is a
sign: “English spoken here by man who left City Cork 65 years ago.”
This is former millionaire builder Tony O’Connor, who made a
fortune and then lost the lot a decade ago when the construction boom went
bust. Don’t expect to hear a lilting Leeside accent, though - his parents left
Cork for London when he was small and he’s as Cockney as they come.
Tony, who has emphysema, has a pitch in front of the famed La
Mallorquina cake shop, whose display windows need to be wiped a couple of times
a day to remove child-sized palm prints and smudges left by little noses
pressed against the glass.
“I don’t have the breath to sing and I can’t compete with
those young guys over there doing their acrobatics,” says Tony. “I’m lucky to
collect €400 a month in winter, though I can make around €1,400 in the summer,
just sitting here chatting with whoever stops to hear my story. A couple of
years ago, a guy handed me an envelope and disappeared. When I opened it, there
was €600 inside. I couldn’t believe it.”
On the third floor above La Mallorquina is the luxury
apartment that Tony and his wife had to sell when it all went wrong. If it came
on the market today, the owner would be looking for at least €700,000. “Ah,
well, that’s life,” says Tony, and breaks off to direct an English couple to
Madrid’s top visitor attraction, the Prado Museum.
The Prado and its near neighbours, the Reina Sofia and the
Thyssen-Bornemisza, form the 1.5-kilometre-long Paseo del Arte (Art Walk),
otherwise known as the Golden Triangle. No other city in the world has three
treasure houses in such close proximity. The English couple are in for a treat.
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| Velazquez's Las Meninas in the Prado Museum |
The Prado is a 15-minute stroll from Puerta del Sol and
houses the most important collection of Spanish art in the world. It also has
the best air-conditioning in Madrid, a godsend in July and August when
afternoon temperatures hit 30C and forget to stop.
Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez (1599-1660) and Francisco
Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) are the stars of the show, with El Greco
as the main support act on a bill that includes Rubens, Raphael, Titian,
Tintoretto, Van Der Weyden, Ribera, Zurburan and Murillo, which sounds like a
Real Madrid starting XI.
While the galleries and halls of the Prado are dripping with
masterpieces, two paintings attract the biggest crowds: Velazquez’s Las Meninas
(1656), which is most visitors’ favourite, and Goya’s Carlos IV of Spain and
His Family (1801).
Goya’s portrait depicts King Carlos, his wife Maria Luisa,
seven of their 14 children, including Crown Prince Ferdinand who later ruled as
the despised Ferdinand VII, and other relatives in a line-up more motley than
majestic.
The focal point of Las Meninas is King Felipe IV and Queen
Mariana’s five-year-old daughter Princess Margarita, who stands with two
ladies-in-waiting, a nun, a dwarf, a jester and a mastiff dog. In an open
doorway in the background lurks the queen’s chamberlain, and reflected in a
mirror on the back wall are Felipe and Mariana.
In perhaps the first example of a selfie, Velazquez has
included himself in his most-admired work, eyes front as he paints the
out-of-shot royal couple, hence their reflection in the mirror. Not to be
outdone, fellow bighead Goya appears in the background of his painting of
Carlos and his kin.
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| Picasso's Guernica attracts visitors from all over the world to the Reina Sofia |
French painter Edouard Manet (1832-1883) said Seville-born
Velazquez was “the greatest painter that has ever existed. He alone is worth
the trip to Madrid”. Few who stand before Las Meninas would disagree, but it’s
another painting by another Andalucian, in the Reina Sofia, that art lovers
from all over the world do make the trip to see.
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is arguably the best-known
painting of the 20th century. Measuring 7.8 by 3.5 metres, it’s certainly one
of the biggest. Completed in black, white and grey oils on canvas, it’s a
denunciation of the aerial bombing on April 26, 1937 of the eponymous Basque
town by Hitler’s Condor Legion.
Picasso, or to give him his full name, Pablo Diego Jose
Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la
Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, which added five minutes to the morning roll
call in school, was born in Malaga in October 1881 and spent most of his long
adult life in France, where he died aged 91 in April 1973.
It was in his Paris loft that he painted Guernica for the
Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in his adopted
city. On learning of the attack - the town was the northern stronghold of the
Republican resistance during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which made it a
target for Franco’s Nationalist forces - Picasso abandoned his intended
commissioned work and produced instead the most powerful anti-war painting of
all time.
The bombs fell on market day, and many women and children
were among the at least 300 people killed. A mother holding a dead baby
features large in the work, but the two most prominent figures are a bull,
representing the onslaught of fascism, and a gored horse, representing the
people of the town (horses were often disembowelled by the bulls’ horns during
a corrida).
The death and destruction visited upon Guernica were
appalling; that the attack was used by the Condor Legion and the Italian
Aviazione Legionaria to try out new carpet bombing techniques on a civilian
target was atrocious. At the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Luftwaffe chief Herman
Goering said Guernica was a “testing ground” - confirmation, if any were
needed, that Picasso painted the nightmarish result of a cynical experiment in
extermination.
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| Hans Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza M. Duran Albareda |
Portraiture rules in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and its most
instantly recognisable portrait is of a ruler. German artist Hans Holbein the
Younger’s (1497-1543) painting of Henry VIII of England is one of scores of
contemporaneous copies of the original (1537), which was lost in a fire in
1698, but this is the only one by Holbein (the others were by apprentices).
Think of Henry, and this is the bejewelled and bejowled image that springs to
mind.
While the Prado and the Reina Sofia allow art lovers to study
specific painters’ bodies of work, the Thyssen-Bornemisza is more a Hall of
Fame of all-time greats, who are represented in abundance.
Bacon is here, as are Freud, Pollock, Munch and Hockney, whose
1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold recently at auction in
New York to an anonymous buyer for $90.3m, setting a new record for a work by a
living artist. Visitors can also gaze upon paintings by Spaniards Dali and
Miro; France’s Gauguin, Manet, Renoir, Degas and Matisse; Dutch masters
Rembrandt and Vermeer; and Italy’s Caravaggio, Canaletto and Tintoretto. It’s
like rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty at the best Oscars after-party.
The museum’s most poignant painting is not a portrait.
Vincent van Gogh’s French rural landscape, Les Vessenots, is the last work he
completed, only days before his suicide in 1890. In late May of that year, the
Dutch post-impressionist (born 1853) travelled 35kms north from Paris to the
village of Auvers-sur-Oise. For several weeks he worked outdoors in glorious
weather, producing many landscapes, until he surrendered to his demons. On the
morning of July 27, Van Gogh put down his paintbrush, lifted a gun and ended
his torment. He was 37.
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| Vincent Van Gogh's last painting, Les Vessenots, in the Thyssen-Bornemisza |
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| Who needs a full Irish when you can have chocolate con churros? |
Cocido is the comfort food that exiled Madrileños yearn for
in the way Irish people living abroad dream of Tayto crisps. A hearty but not
mushy stew, it typically contains chicken, beef, bacon, pork belly, morcilla
(blood sausage), chorizo, potatoes, carrots, cabbage and chickpeas. It’s among
the top choices when eating out, but even as they’re tucking in, diners are
thinking: “Mmmm, tasty, but nowhere near as tasty as Mama’s.” In a word, albeit
a makey-uppy one, cocido is stewpendous.
Merluza (hake), bacalao (cod), rape (rah-pay - monkfish) and
dorado (sea bream) are the most popular fish dishes, but when time is pressing,
the seafood snack of choice is the bocata de calamares, a hot bread roll that’s
crispy on the outside, moist inside and loaded with deep-fried squid rings. No
sauce, no garnish, no need.
A close second in the snack stakes is the bocata de jamon
Serrano. The air-cured, mildewed legs of ham from which wafer-thin slices of
succulent Serrano are carved with expert precision bordering on the
parsimonious cost up to €500 each, but a bocata will set you back a mere €3.
Traditionalists prefer their ham on a plate, accompanied perhaps by slices of
Manchego cheese and some big fat juicy olives that have been marinated so long they’re
falling apart.
Chocolateria de San Gines, which opened in 1894, never
closes, so there’s no excuse for not feasting on the quintessential Spanish
breakfast of chocolate con churros. These long fingers of deep-fried doughnut
batter (and the fatter version, porras) dipped in hot chocolate are a great
start to the day, though they’re also devoured by nightclubbers on their way
home when most people have been asleep for hours.
If any dish can be said to occupy the throne of Spanish
cuisine, it’s the tortilla de patatas - the ubiquitous potato omelette. It’s
made with only three ingredients: eggs, sliced boiled potatoes and onions. Some
cooks who don’t know any better add chopped red peppers, a sacrilege akin to
putting honey on a Highlander’s porridge. Tortilla de patatas needs no
adornment, though if the onions are caramelised before being added to the mix,
the omelette steps up from perfecto to perfectisimo.
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| Spain's national dish, the tortilla de patatas - simple yet sensational |
On the wall of the Antigua Farmacia de la Reina Madre on
Calle Mayor, the illuminated green cross shows the temperature is 19C and the
hour 22.05. Time to walk the short distance to one of the author’s favourite
haunts, Plaza de Santa Ana, where hundreds of people are eating and drinking on
the terraces of some of the most popular bars and restaurants in the city (‘Don
Ernesto’ drank daily in Cerveceria Alemana).
Jazz and other live music venues abound around here, but in
the plaza itself is Villa Rosa where, every night, art and soul fuse in a
frenetic performance of raw passion that makes audiences’ hearts beat faster
and throats go dry. It’s called flamenco, and Villa Rosa, which staged its
first show in 1911, is the temple to which aficionados and tourists flock. It’s
not the only place staging this most Spanish of spectacles, which consists of
three parts - guitar, song and dance - but it’s the best.
A statue of Granada-born poet and playwright Federico Garcia
Lorca (1898-1936) stands in Plaza de Santa Ana. Lorca, who was executed without
trial by a right-wing firing squad in the opening month of the Spanish Civil
War, lived in Madrid for 17 years and never missed a chance to see a flamenco
show. No one has better described the principal performer.
He wrote: “The dancer’s trembling heart must bring everything
into harmony, from the tips of her shoes to the flutter of her eyelashes, from
the rustles of her dress to the incessant play of her fingers. Shipwrecked in a
field of air, she must measure lines, silences, zig-zags and rapid curves, with
a sixth sense of aroma and geometry, without ever mistaking her terrain. In
this she resembles the torero, whose heart must keep to the neck of the bull.
Both of them face the same danger - he, death; and she, darkness.”
Flamenco, football, food, fine art and a fella with an
orchestra at his damp fingertips are only a few of the attractions that make a
long weekend in the Spanish capital a memorable experience. There’s an old
saying: “If you’re in Madrid, you’re from Madrid.” Well, maybe; but one thing’s
for sure - if you’re in Madrid, you have very good taste in cities.
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| Flamenco show in Villa Rosa, Plaza de Santa Ana |
GET THERE
Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus.com, from €45.99 one way) and Ryanair (www.ryanair.com,
from €19.99) fly daily from Dublin to Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas airport.
The Airport Express yellow bus service to and
from the city centre operates 24 hours, every 15 minutes during the day and
every 35 minutes at night. There are only three stops - O’Donnell, Atocha and
Plaza de Cibeles (this last one is the most central). The journey takes around
40 minutes and a one-way ticket costs €5 from the driver.
EAT
Cocido: In 2015, the multi-award-winning Cruz Blanca Vallecas (58
Martin Alvarez, www.cruzblancavallecas.com)
received the National Catering Award for its cocido, and quite right too. Try
also Casa Paco (11 Puerta Cerrada, www.casapaco1933.es), a family-run restaurant that
serves a wide range of fabulous homemade food.
Bocata de calamares: El Brillante (8 Plaza del
Emperador Carlos V, www.barelbrillante.es)
serves 2,000 bocatas de calamares every day, and that’s recommendation enough.
Bocata de jamon Serrano: The excellent kosher
restaurant El Escudilla (16 Santisima Trinidad, www.restauranteelescudilla.com) is one of only
a handful of establishments in Madrid that doesn’t offer bocatas de jamon
Serrano or anything else containing pork. Otherwise, every bar, cafe and
restaurant serves this simple yet sensational staple.
Chocolate con churros: Chocolateria de San Gines (5
Pasadizo de San Gines, www.chocolateriadesangines.com)
serves 10,000 freshly-made churros and 2,000 cups of hot chocolate every day.
Chocolateria Valor (7 Postigo de San Martin, www.valor.es)
is the pretender to San Gines’s crown.
Tortilla de patatas: The potato omelette served
in Juana la Loca (4 Plaza de la Puerta de Moros, www.juanalalocamadrid.com) has no equal. Juana la Loca
(Joanna the Mad), the elder sister of Catherine of Aragon and sister-in-law of
Henry VIII, was Queen of Castile from 1504 to 1555, but never actually ruled
due to her mental instability.
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| Hearts begin to beat faster when the sun sets on Madrid, but the night is still young |
VISIT
Prado Museum: Paseo del Prado (Metro Banco de España). Mon-Sat 10am-8pm, Sun
10am-7pm; general admission €15. www.museodelprado.es
Reina Sofia Museum: 52 Santa Isabel (Metro
Atocha). Mon-Sat (closed Tuesday) 10am-9pm, Sun 10am-7pm; general admission
€10. www.museoreinasofia.es
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum: Paseo del Prado (Metro Banco
de España). Mon 12pm-4pm, Tues-Sun 10am-7pm; general admission €12. www.museothyssen.org
Santiago Bernabeu: Avenida de Concha Espina
(Metro Santiago Bernabeu). Stadium tour, including trophy room, dressing room,
press room and pitch, Mon-Sat 10am-7pm, Sun 10.30am-6.30pm (except match days);
from €18. www.realmadrid.com
Tablao de Flamenco
Villa Rosa: 15 Plaza de Santa Ana
(Metros Sol, Anton Martin and Tirso de Molina). Shows: Sun-Thu 8.30pm and
10.45pm, Fri & Sat 8.30pm, 10.45pm and 12.15am. Admission to a show,
including a drink, costs €35; show plus meal, including a drink, from €65. Book
well in advance online. www.tablaoflamencovillrosa.com
STAY
On my most recent of many trips over the years to Madrid I
stayed in the 5-star VP Plaza de España Design, which opened last spring. On
the 12th floor, the Gingko Restaurant and Sky Bar with its swimming pool and
wraparound terrace welcomes non-guests and has quickly become one of the city’s
most popular nightspots for wining, dining, partying and 360-degree views of
the city. Double rooms cost from €220. www.plazaespana-hotel.com
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| The VP Plaza España Design hotel, close to the Royal Palace |
