Map My Walk

Tuesday, October 1
Madrid

Retiro Park

This was our first full day in Madrid, and the last day we would have pre-paid tickets for the hop-on-hop-off bus, so we all took off after breakfast intending to hop a bit. And so we did. Mark, KC and I got off at first and walked past the Prado and San Jerónimo el Real (not stopping for the church!) to the entrance to the Parque Retiro. The day was a little gray, but we were determined not to let that spoil our day. As it turned out, the skies soon cleared and we another beautiful day to enjoy outdoors.

The park is huge, well maintained, and really a beautiful place. We saw school groups, joggers, and even a small orchestra. Really. Players were walking through the park, plucking strings and making occasional musical sounds, going to the Crystal Palace for what we found out later was just a photo shoot.

The surroundings intrigued us more than the players, though, so we spent a little time just walking around, noting trees that had been trimmed in a somewhat strange ways and laughing at magpies and cats.

Occasionally, we walked past sculpture both modern and traditional, and eventually we turned right to head for KC’s first goal of the day.

I have to admit, the Crystal Palace is a beautiful place, and worth the walk through the park any day you get a chance to see it. Built as a large greenhouse, it’s perfectly situated along a man-made lake, with nicely planned pathways to bring you to it from a number of different directions. It’s now used for other purposes, including musical performances, and I bet the sound in there is really good.

We walked past the rose garden, stopped for ice cream, left the park and looked unsuccessfully for the entrance to the Botanical Garden, and went into the church we had passed earlier. Once again, we discovered beautiful chapels, but only a quite undistinguished looking small organ that looked sort of lost in a big rear gallery.

Next we tried to get back on a bus to move to the other side of the city and the presidential palace and other sights we wanted to see. Unfortunately, we walked more than we might have. I got into my full “tour guide” mode and took us to the wrong intersection, so we never did get back on the bus at that point. We just kept walking up hill, slowly making our way back in the general direction of the hotel, until got to the place where Calle de Alcalà, the street with our hotel, meets Calle Gran Via, where we could get on the bus. It was time for lunch, so we sat at a bar, ate more tapas and dropped napkins on the floor, and rested for a bit.

Fully refreshed, we hopped back on at the next stop and enjoyed the ride, now in full sunshine, westward past expensive looking shops without stopping at all. It really was a nice day to see many of the things we had glimpsed through the small windows of the bus the day before. The Plaza de España, with its monument to Cervantes in the center, is just one of the many and varied great spaces we saw in Madrid. In my humble opinion, which I respect very highly, this is the way to lay out a city. Green space might be a late twentieth-century concept in some US cities, but the Spaniards know what to do a couple of hundred years before that.

We hopped off at the Parque del Oeste, so we could visit the Temple of Debod. I will probably never get to Egypt to see the pyramids, the Sphinx, or any of the other great surviving monuments of Ancient Egypt, so this was my chance. Spain had helped save another Egyptian monument when construction of the Aswan dam threatened it, so the Egyptian government gave this Temple to Spain. Now it’s one of the few pieces of ancient Egyptian architecture you can visit outside of Egypt, and I really didn’t want to miss the chance. On top of that, it’s really situated in a beautiful place, another of those green spaces I liked so much. Must be my farm-boy upbringing showing up again.

After we goggled a bit at the carvings both inside and outside the temple, we walked through another part of the park and crossed the street. Here we were, walking along the other side of the Plaza de España, and getting a look at more intriguing buildings along the way. We had seen an interesting looking dome from the park after we left the Temple, and here we were across the street from it. Fascinating building that I found out later is the Church of Santa Teresa y San José. We missed going into another church!

Moving further down the street, we made it to the Presidential Palace, another one of our goals. The day before, glancing through an opening in the wall, we had seen uniformed riders on horses, but today the large plaza was empty of anyone but the occasional tourist. We didn’t take a tour through the public areas, we just looked through the gates. Another reason to return to Madrid: the list of things we didn’t visit is longer than the list of things we did see up close.

While we were looking through the gates at the Palace, all we had to do was turn around to see the Cathedral, Santa María la Real de La Almudena. Being typical tourists who hadn’t planned ahead, we were disappointed not to find the entrance anywhere along the Neo-Baroque building started less than two hundred years ago, and it looked like we couldn’t get in! I don’t know about Mark and KC, but by this point I wasn’t sure I could walk another step. This disappointment was almost too much.

Then we walked down the street beside the cathedral and saw the signs pointing to an entrance through one of the transepts. Yay! If we hadn’t been able to enter, we would have missed quite a place. It’s hard to say what surprised me more, and I don’t want to forget anything. The photo to the left is just a teaser, with much more to see on the Madrid Photo page.

Revived a bit by this visit, I felt better about walking to the next bus stop, then walking up the slight hill to the hotel when we hopped off at Puerta del Sol. I really am sorry I didn’t pop up my Map My Walk app on the phone. There’s no telling how far I really walked, but it was no doubt longer than the little strolls through the neighborhood I’m accustomed to making with Ms. Lucille. We got back to the hotel to meet Judy and Tori, refreshed ourselves a bit, then headed out for dinner. The Mexican restaurant we ended up in wasn’t all that great, but we had a good time comparing notes about our different days — and speculating on what the next day’s trip to Toledo would be like.