Madrid

Madrid's oldest addresses have a habit of outliving the people who wrote about them. Hemingway ended The Sun Also Rises at a restaurant that had already been open for two centuries and is still roasting suckling pig in the same oven; Picasso was buried in a cape from a shop that still makes them. Everything below is within a twenty-minute walk of the Puerta del Sol.

Stay

Institutions

Mandarin Oriental Ritz (Plaza de la Lealtad) — Alfonso XIII wanted a hotel to match the Ritz in London and Paris, and Charles Mewès and Luis de Landecho built it between 1908 and 1910, beside the Prado. Mata Hari stayed under another name in 1916, and during the Civil War it was a military hospital. It reopened in 2021 after a long restoration.