Madrid holds a distinction that may surprise many visitors wandering through its grand boulevards and royal palaces: it’s the only European capital city founded by a Muslim ruler. Yet this fundamental fact about Spain’s capital often remains largely hidden from public view, buried not just in time but quite literally underground in car parks and […]
Nestled below the royal palace lies one of the city’s most beautiful and overlooked treasures: the Campo del Moro gardens. One of the destinations in my new book Quiet Madrid: A Guide to the City’s Third Spaces and Hidden Places, these stunning gardens offer both tranquility and a fascinating glimpse into the city’s medieval past.
Think you know Madrid? Think again. Beneath the grand boulevards and baroque palaces lies a city with a very different origin story—one that’s largely hidden from view. My new audio tour with Voicemap, Medieval Madrid: A Guide to the City’s Muslim Past, peels back the layers of time to reveal a forgotten history that begins
The bauble-like red berries from the madroño tree emerge right around the time Madrid’s Christmas lights get switched on, making them seasonal but extremely easy to miss against the neon blare. However, if you look carefully you can find them all around the city. And you can certainly spot representations of the tree on everything
Why a bear and strawberry tree? Visitors seeking an Instagrammable picture of themselves in Madrid often head to the statue of the bear and strawberry tree in Sol. It’s an iconic symbol that appears all over the city from manhole covers to public bins, to the logo of the much-maligned Atlético de Madrid – Madrid’s
It’s not easy piecing together a Jewish history of Madrid. While nearby Toledo has not one but two medieval synagogues, little hard physical evidence of Madrid’s Jewish population remains. This stands to reason as Toledo was, of course, a much larger and more important location in medieval Spain. But documents attest to the fact that
One of Madrid’s great mysteries is why Philip II named a country backwater as his capital when he had other, far more well-established cities to choose from. While Madrid is geographically slap bang in the center of Spain, in the 16th century roads were so poor that some believe delays in delivering the king’s orders
