Plank Road: Last Day in Madrid

It was a gorgeous day today, sunny and hot. We walked over to the navel museum but the whole street was cordoned off and swarming with guards and cops. The friendly military-looking guy apologized profusely that we could not enter the museum due to an ‘emergency.’ The museum is located in a military building and he did not know when the situation would resolve. There tends to be a lot of armed guard-type personnel hanging around government buildings in Madrid, we see them a lot.

We walked over to a large park in Madrid, the Parque de el Retiro, as it is a pleasant green space with a lot of statues and fountains. The Monument to Alfonso XII is fronted by a small concrete pond where people rent rowboats to float around the small pond. We found this somewhat bizarre as we are accustomed to canoeing in gigantic bodies of water.

Next, a walk into old Madrid was on the agenda, where we roamed the streets and plazas but avoided the main tourist areas. We stopped for our obligatory café con leche in Plaza del Angel, and sat outside at a table. The prices in Madrid are double what they are in the rural areas of Spain.

We don’t really rely on a map, we just walk and use the sun to determine which direction to go when we have had enough walking and want to go back in the direction of our apartment. We stopped in at our apartment as John needed a cooler shirt, we had a yogourt, as we need to consume all of our groceries today, and then we walked to the Sorolla Museum.

Sorolla, 1863 - 1923, was a painter from Valencia, on the south coast of Spain, he moved to Madrid in 1890. His paintings of the seaside are beautiful, he captures the light of the Valencian coast in his paintings. He was a prolific and hard working painter, painting for six to nine hours a day.

The museum is located in the Sorolla home, which was designed by Sorolla. It is rather unique to get to see his studio, as well as many other rooms with furnishings, which are now used as a gallery for his work. This is a wonderful museum to visit as there is an Andalusian garden, a collection of ceramics, and Sorolla’s paintings, it is all quite idyllic. We visited during a time of free admission and it was not busy; quite the contrast to the Prado, which had a lineup a mile long when we walked by earlier in the day.

The Sorolla Museum is located north of central Madrid in the trendy Salamanca area, which is very quiet with nary a tourist. After we left the Sorolla Museum we walked back into the thick of things and bought a good bottle of wine, as this is our last night in Spain.

Tomorrow we have to get a very early start to catch the express bus to the airport to catch a flight to Brussels. We are looking forward to having lunch with our Belgian friends tomorrow, but the weather will be a shock, as it is supposed to be windy and wet with a high of 10 degrees in Brussels, today we had a high of 26 degrees or so. After an overnight stay in Brussels, we fly home.

This has been another spectacular trip, we have loved all of it, Spain is an exceptional country for travel. We appreciated the various areas of Spain, they have a strong regional identity and promote the products from their region. We were forever encountering shops in the tiniest of villages that advertised ‘Products from Extremadura.’ We are hard pressed to find anything from Extremadura in Madrid. And the people were a joy to meet and interact with, even though our communication skills in Spanish are limited, it just does not matter.

Palacio de Cibeles