Madrid with kids city trip

Sep 3

Sep 3 What we did, in Madrid

Our summer holiday this year was to Madrid and as always, I like to get all the factual data on what we did in one place, before doing more photo heavy posts on specific things. I really recommend Madrid as a destination. For a city its size it doesn’t have that many tourist sites, and this is totally a good thing, as it did not feel touristy at all except in a very small area. We actually struggled to find postcards! You basically just get a really fun, colourful city in which to do city things.

So anyway, here’s what we got up to.

Accomodation and Location

We stayed in this airbnb, and it was so perfect (roof terrace!!!). We had picked it pretty much purely because it had three bedrooms (Dave’s mum came with us) and was nice. We didn’t really look at the area it was in at all, but in a way that was the best thing about it. Malasanya is slightly north of the touristy area, its full of streetart and little indie shops and studenty/hipstery bars. It seems to have quite a high concentration of daytime laptop workers, but also families. The square our flat was nearest to, Plaza dos del Mayo, had three playparks on it, in the corners of the square. In fact, the whole area was full of small playparks, there was one pretty much every ten metres along the main road to the big supertmarket we used, I’ve never seen anything like it. Dave’s mum thought it was due to the climate, but Lisbon is similarly nice and we had to google playparks because we didn’t come across any.

Sights

As always, we didn’t go into too many things you have to pay for, because pre-school attention spans and mostly just wandered about. We walked round all the obvious tourist things, the Royal Palace, the Passeo del Prado with the big Museums on (we didn’t go into any of them, though Dave’s mum went to the Prado, and if we hadn’t had the kids, I would have loved to have gone to the Thyssen, because of the early/mid 20th century European modern art, and because there was an Op Art exhibition on) and spent a day in the Retiro, a massive, quite formal park with a boating lake, a glasshouse and an art gallery in it.

One thing worth mentioning that wasn’t in anything I’d been told/read online, and was only mentioned in the briefest of way in my guidebook was the Madrid Rio Park. It’s in the South of the city by the river, in an area that is basically all humungous modern apartment blocks, and underneath some big motorway style distribution roads. Which all doesn’t sound so appealing, but it was awesome. It’s newly developed, there’s lots of playgrounds, a bit with lots of steep tubular slides, and the best bit, fountains you can run through and squirt water on a random system. I think they might be called splash pads, I’d only ever heard of them in New York. There’s a skatepark and football pitches too and on the one end of it is a big cultural centre with lots of random exhibtions, cafes and restaurants, and the base of a ballet company. We actually went there on two days!

We also wanted to go on the cable car to the Casa del Campo park/forest, but it wasn’t running. They told us it would reopen on our last day, but it never did and looks like its still closed now. The Parque del Oeste park it starts from is pretty good itself, it has an Egyptian Temple in it (moved from Egypt and rebuilt, the way people used to do these things), and massive rose garden.

We did go to one museum, the museum of railways, with lots of old trains. ’twas ok, fun for the kids, but much the same as any of these type of things anywhere really. They did have an actual steam engine cut in half so you could see the internal workings, which Dave was keen on.

We had also intended to do a daytrip to one of the many historical towns nearby, but the trains are super weird in that you can get either a slow train that takes two hours, or a fast one that takes half an hour, but the high speed trains stop at special stations like six miles outside the actual towns. And factoring in a bus trip as well just kind of seemed more hassle than it was worth with the lickle ones.

Also, streetart, lots of streetart. I’m not even through my London photos and I have literally hundreds more from Madrid.

Coffee/Food

Madrid is supposed to be amazing for food, which we didn’t totally take advantage of, as the boys are being very unadventurous and lived almost entirely off tortilla for the week. We mainly just picked random places in the square or wherever we were. We did research speciality coffees though because we do love our coffee, so a few of the ones I’m about to recommend do have excellent coffee:

Mision Cafe: We found this by accident, I was looking for nearby coffee places on google maps, and that was the best reviewed. It was on the way from our flat to the Plaza Espanya metro, so it was really convenient, but also it was just really really good. We went mainly for (excellent) coffee and pastries, but also had breakfast on my birthday there – I had granola with kefir, and the most amazing stewed apricots and loads of other stuff I can’t remember. They also served proper food which all sounded amazing, a mix of spanish standards, brunchy type things and Asian inspired dishes. We later found out that it is a sister cafe of:
Hola: This is the original one, and the home of the coffee roaster of the same name (we got some beans, obvs). The interiors are the same style, and the crockery was the same. The food menu was smaller, but we had some lovely open sandwiches.
La Colectiva Cafe. We went there on the recommendation of a spciality coffee website, but thought the coffee was less good that in the other places (though still good), but this was made up for by the food, which is all vegan and amazing. The boys had some spicy pastries filled with veg and tofu, which is frankly some kind of miracle. The area this is in, Chamberi, is just north of where were staying and didn’t seem that much happening, it’s just residential, although it does seem to have a concentration of speciality coffee places so maybe that’s about to change
Hanso coffee. We just went there for coffee and cake, another five star in terms of the coffee I’d say. I saw people have some matcha waffles with a mountain of fruit which looked amazing.
Toma. Another five star coffee place, just a couple of streets away from our flat. It’s small and was always full of people on laptops. We tried so many times to go there and eventually managed, though its not really made for big groups and/or kids!
Lolo Polos Artesanos This was a healthy ice lolly place, they were made with fruit, yoghurt and juice and the flavours changed every day. Plus the interior was pastel rainbow goodness!
Zombie bar. We had a bit of a craving for burgers, and went there one afternoon. It’s a dive bar really, and I was a bit apprehensive about taking two preschoolers and a retired person there, but the burgers were REALLY good and everyone one of them came in veggie, which is always appreciated.
Lolina bar. On my birthday, Dave and I went out for cocktails/G&Ts and this is where we went. The place is fully decked out in mid century living room style. They also produce their own vermouth, which I sort of regret not trying
Matilda. This was another google maps find, in a surprisingly fun area just behind the Caixa Forum/bottom of the Museum mile. It’s arty and a bit ramshackle and the exterior is so good I’ve accidentally out it in both my mosaic pictures! It just felt like a real oasis of friendliness, about five minutes from the museums
Mercado San Miguel. This is a newly develkoped fancy foodhall basically, you can buy tapas from lots of stands then eat them in the seats. It is quite touristy, but not overly so. I don’t think we made the best choices in what we ate, the boys were hungry and somehow we ended up eating a lot of fried beige food. Which was all nice, but didn’t completely add up to an actual meal. We later found out that there is another less touristy (and probably less swanky) version of this (called Mercado San Anton I think)