Dukes, Monks and an Egyptian Temple: Madrid's Conde Duque to Templo de Debod

From Neruda's House of Flowers past the palace of the Dukes of Alba, a baroque barracks and forgotten convents, to Don Quixote, a marquis's treasure house and sunset over a 2,000-year-old Egyptian temple

Madrid · 11 stops · 24 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Casa de las Flores: Neruda's House of Flowers

   Calle de Rodríguez San Pedro 72, 28015 Madrid, Spain

   Stand on the corner and take in the whole block: warm red brick, rows of balconies, and on almost every one, pots of geraniums and trailing green. It is an entire block of flats, wrapped around a big inner garden that you can glimpse through the arches.

   This is the Casa de las Flores, the House of Flowers, designed by the architect Secundino Zuazo and finished in the early 1930s. It was a quiet revolution in housing. Instead of the dark inner courtyards of old Madrid, Zuazo gave the tenants a garden in the middle, light from both sides of every flat, and balconies made for plants. Architects still come to study it.

   In 1934 a young Chilean diplomat moved in. He was the consul of Chile, and he was also a poet called Pablo Neruda. His flat became one of the liveliest literary salons in Madrid. Federico García Lorca came to visit, and so did Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández and many of the young poets later grouped as the Generation of 1927. They read aloud, argued and stayed late into the night under these balconies.

   It did not last. In July 1936 the Civil War began, and by that November this district of Argüelles lay close to the front line, as Franco's troops reached the western edge of Madrid. The building was damaged and Neruda left Spain. In a famous poem written soon afterwards, he remembered his house, its flowers and its friends... and the war that had broken into all of them.

   Today the geraniums are back, and the House of Flowers is simply home to Madrid families again. From here, walk south along Calle de la Princesa. On your left, behind tall railings and a screen of trees, hides a palace that most people pass without ever noticing it. It belongs to one of the oldest noble families in Europe.

2. 2. Palacio de Liria: Home of the Dukes of Alba

   Calle de la Princesa 20, 28008 Madrid, Spain

   Peer through the railings on Calle de la Princesa, past the lawns and the trees, at the long neoclassical palace of pale stone with its columned centre. Most people walking to the shops never even turn their heads. That is a mistake, because behind those windows hangs one of the finest private art collections in Europe.

   This is the Palacio de Liria, built in the second half of the eighteenth century, with Ventura Rodríguez, the great architect of the age, shaping its final design. It was commissioned by the Duke of Berwick and Liria, and here the story takes a very British turn. The first Duke of Berwick, James FitzJames, was an illegitimate son of King James the Second of England. He fought for Philip V in the War of the Spanish Succession, won him the decisive battle of Almansa in 1707, and was rewarded with Spanish lands and titles.

   His descendants married into the House of Alba, and the collection grew with every generation: Goya's portrait of the Duchess of Alba dressed in white, works by Titian and Rubens, and in the library, letters signed by Christopher Columbus.

   In November 1936, during the Civil War, the palace was hit in the bombing of Madrid and burned out. Much of the collection had been moved to safety beforehand, but the building was a shell. It was rebuilt after the war, slowly and faithfully. Ten years before the fire, in 1926, the palace had seen the birth of its most famous resident, Cayetana, eighteenth Duchess of Alba, the woman said to hold more titles than anyone else alive.

   For centuries this was a strictly private world. Only in 2019 did the family open its rooms to visitors. Now walk round the back of the palace to Calle del Conde Duque. And remember that battle of Almansa, won on Saint Mark's day... it will come back to you later on this walk.

3. 3. Cuartel del Conde Duque: The Royal Guard's Barracks

   Calle del Conde Duque 9, 28015 Madrid, Spain

   Face the enormous brick façade on Calle del Conde Duque and let your eye run along it, window after window, until it reaches the main door. And what a door: a riot of carved stone, curling volutes, trophies of flags and weapons, all piled up around the entrance as if the stone itself were celebrating.

   This was a barracks, built from 1717 for Philip V's Royal Guard, the Guardias de Corps, the elite horsemen who protected the king. Its architect was Pedro de Ribera, the wild man of Madrid baroque, who loved exactly this kind of exuberant doorway. The building was huge, with three great courtyards, and its façade fills an entire street block. The street and the building take their name from the Count-Duke of Olivares, the all-powerful minister of Philip IV, whose family owned houses nearby.

   Barracks, however, rarely stay barracks. In 1869 a fire destroyed much of the upper part of the building. The army slowly abandoned it, and by the second half of the twentieth century it was a decaying ruin that many expected to be demolished.

   Instead, in the 1980s, the city restored it and gave it a new life as a cultural centre. Today the old courtyards host summer concerts, and the building holds the municipal archive, a historic library and a museum of contemporary art. Where cavalrymen once groomed their horses, students now sit with laptops and pensioners read the newspapers.

   Before you go, step into the first courtyard and look back at the doorway from the inside. Ribera's exuberance is only on the outside: inside, the barracks is plain and practical. A show of power for the street, discipline within. Now walk down the street a little and turn left into a small, quiet square, where a convent of noblewomen has stood for more than three and a half centuries.

4. 4. Plaza de las Comendadoras: The Knights' Nuns

   Plaza de las Comendadoras 10, 28015 Madrid, Spain

   Take a seat on a bench in this little square and look at the church along one side, a sober brick and stone front with a dome rising behind it. Pigeons, plane trees, children on scooters, café tables. It is one of the calmest corners in the centre of Madrid.

   The church belongs to the Comendadoras de Santiago, and the name holds a surprise. The Order of Santiago was a military order of knights, founded in the twelfth century to fight in the wars against the Moors, with the red sword-shaped cross of Saint James as its badge. It also had women members: comendadoras, nuns of the order, and for centuries they had to prove noble lineage to be admitted.

   This convent was founded in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the church was built in the following decades by the architects Manuel and José del Olmo. Inside, over the high altar, hangs a great painting by Luca Giordano, the fast-working Neapolitan master, showing Saint James on horseback in battle. Look for the red cross of Santiago carved on the outside walls too: the knights signed everything they owned.

   The nuns are still here, behind those walls, living in an enclosed community. It is a strange thought: on one side of the square, people drink coffee and argue about football; on the other, a way of life has continued, quietly, through wars, revolutions and the arrival of the internet.

   Madrid has dozens of these convent squares, but most visitors never find them because they sit on no main road. That is the joy of this neighbourhood: you turn a corner and the century changes. Leave the square on its eastern side and walk to Calle de San Bernardo. Look out for a baroque church tower that seems to be waiting for a twin that never came.

5. 5. Iglesia de Montserrat: The Church of the Exiled Monks

   Calle de San Bernardo 79, 28015 Madrid, Spain

   On Calle de San Bernardo, stop in front of the church with the single, richly carved tower climbing up on one side of its front. Now look at the other side. Something is missing. The façade feels lopsided, as if the building had stopped halfway through a sentence.

   The church is Nuestra Señora de Montserrat, and its story begins far away, on the jagged mountain of Montserrat near Barcelona. In 1640 Catalonia rose in revolt against Philip IV, in what is called the Reapers' War. The Benedictine monastery of Montserrat had both Catalan and Castilian monks, and the rebels threw out the Castilians, who were seen as loyal to the king.

   The exiled monks came to Madrid and founded a new house here, dedicated to the same black Madonna they had left behind. Philip IV supported them, glad to show that loyalty to the crown would be rewarded. Building began in 1668, slowly, as money came and went.

   The tower you see was added in the 1720s by Pedro de Ribera, the same architect as the Conde Duque barracks, in the exuberant style Spaniards call Churrigueresque: broken cornices, curling scrolls, pinnacles and statues. It was meant to have a twin on the other side, and the church itself was meant to be much longer. Neither ever happened. The money ran out, the monastery was suppressed in the nineteenth century, and the church was left as you see it, a magnificent fragment.

   Madrid is full of half-finished dreams like this one, and somehow they are more moving than the completed ones. The monks never went home to their mountain; their church stayed here, waiting for a tower that never came. Now walk south down Calle de San Bernardo. In a few minutes you reach a long, grave building where, for more than a century, every doctorate in Spain was awarded.

6. 6. Universidad Central: The Caserón de San Bernardo

   Calle de San Bernardo 49, 28015 Madrid, Spain

   Stop opposite the long, severe neoclassical building on Calle de San Bernardo, with its columns, its pediment and its air of a place where people once sat exams in silence. Madrileños call it the Caserón de San Bernardo, the big old house of San Bernardo.

   It began as something else entirely, the novitiate of the Jesuits, where young men trained for the order. When Charles III expelled the Jesuits from Spain in 1767, the building passed to other uses. Then, in 1836, the ancient university of Alcalá de Henares, founded by Cardinal Cisneros at the end of the fifteenth century, was moved to the capital and settled here. It became the Universidad Central.

   For more than a century this was the summit of Spanish academic life. Until 1954, it was the only university in Spain allowed to award doctorates, so anyone in the country who wanted the title of doctor had to come here, to this street, to defend their thesis in the great hall, the Paraninfo.

   Its corridors were full of future famous names. José Rizal, the hero of Philippine independence, studied medicine and philosophy here in the 1880s. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset taught metaphysics from a chair in this university. Writers, politicians and future presidents passed through the courtyard you can glimpse from the door. Imagine the nerves of a young doctor-to-be from Seville or Galicia, after days on the road, climbing these steps to face a panel of professors in black gowns.

   From the 1920s Madrid began building a whole new university city on its north-western edge, and the faculties slowly moved out. But the old house kept its ceremonial heart, and the Paraninfo is still used by the Complutense University for solemn occasions. From here, walk west through the narrow streets towards Calle de San Leonardo, to a small, curved church squeezed between apartment blocks. It hides one of the cleverest interiors in Madrid.

7. 7. Iglesia de San Marcos: Five Ellipses and a Battle

   Calle de San Leonardo 10, 28015 Madrid, Spain

   From the narrow street, look at the church's front: it does not stand flat, it curves gently towards you, like a page bending in the wind. Squeezed between apartment blocks, it is easy to walk past. Please do not.

   Remember the battle of Almansa from the Palacio de Liria? It was fought on the twenty-fifth of April 1707, Saint Mark's day, and it secured the Spanish throne for Philip V. To give thanks, a chapel dedicated to Saint Mark was put up on this spot. Some forty years later it was replaced by the church you see, built between 1749 and 1753.

   The architect was the young Ventura Rodríguez, and this was his first great work. Rodríguez had studied the Roman baroque of Bernini and Borromini, and he played with it like a mathematician. The plan of the church is made of five ellipses that flow into one another, so that inside there is not a single straight wall to rest your eyes on. Walls, cornices and domes all ripple, and the whole space seems to breathe. The frescoes above are by Luis González Velázquez.

   Ventura Rodríguez went on to become the most important architect of eighteenth-century Spain, designing fountains, palaces and cathedral façades all over the country. When he died in 1785, he was buried here, in the first church he ever built, under the ellipses he had drawn as a young man.

   It is a perfect hidden gem: a royal victory, a young genius, his tomb, all tucked into a side street that most people use as a short cut. If the door is open, step in quietly and turn slowly in the middle of the nave. Then walk a couple of minutes south to a square that owes its very existence to a French king of Spain who loved knocking things down.

8. 8. Plaza de los Mostenses: King Joseph's Clearings

   Plaza de los Mostenses 1, 28015 Madrid, Spain

   Stand in front of the plain, boxy market building in the square and read the shop signs around you. Spanish, Chinese, Filipino, Peruvian, Dominican, Bangladeshi... In a few square metres, half the world is buying its groceries.

   The name of the square comes from the Mostenses, the Premonstratensian canons, an order of priests founded in France in the twelfth century, whose convent of San Norberto once stood here. For two centuries the canons sang their offices here, in white habits, on what was then the very edge of town. It disappeared in 1810, and the man who erased it was a king.

   Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's elder brother, was placed on the Spanish throne in 1808. Madrileños never forgave him for being French, but they had to admit that he cared about their cramped, dark city. He ordered convent after convent to be demolished to open up squares, light and air, and the people gave him a nickname that stuck: Pepe Plazuelas, Joe Little-Squares. Plaza de los Mostenses is one of his clearings, and so are several other well-loved squares in the centre.

   In the nineteenth century the space was filled with a market of iron and glass, one of the first modern covered markets in Madrid. The plainer hall you see now replaced it in the twentieth century, while the Gran Vía was being carved through the streets just to the south.

   Today the Mercado de los Mostenses is known across Madrid as the place to find ingredients nobody else sells: Peruvian chillies, Asian greens, Caribbean roots, Spanish ham beside Filipino sweets. It is the honest kitchen of a city where roughly one resident in five was born abroad. Now walk west, along the side street towards the open sky. At the end, a great square opens, with two famous Spaniards on horseback and on donkey.

9. 9. Plaza de España: Cervantes, Don Quixote and Sancho

   Plaza de España, 28008 Madrid, Spain

   Walk up to the big stone monument at the western end of the square. At its foot ride two bronze figures you know even if you have never read the book: a tall, thin knight on a bony horse, and a short, round squire on a donkey. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, setting out once again.

   Above them sits their creator, Miguel de Cervantes, in stone, looking down at his characters. The monument was planned for the three hundredth anniversary of his death in 1916, through a competition won by the architect Rafael Martínez Zapatero and the sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera. Inaugurated in 1929, it was only completed in 1957, finished by the sculptor's son, Federico Coullaut-Valera. Look at the very top: a globe surrounded by figures reading, the peoples of five continents sharing one book.

   Find the two women on either side as well. One is Dulcinea, the ideal lady of Don Quixote's dreams. The other is Aldonza Lorenzo, the real farm girl he turned into that dream. Same person, two statues... that is Cervantes in a nutshell.

   Now turn round and look up. On the eastern side rise two towers of the 1950s, the Edificio España, finished in 1953, and the slimmer Torre de Madrid, which for some years was among the tallest concrete buildings in Europe. They were symbols of a country trying to look modern after years of isolation. And the square itself only exists because the old San Gil barracks were demolished at the start of the twentieth century.

   The square was redesigned and reopened in 2021, with more trees, more shade and space for walking instead of cars. Sit for a moment on a bench by the fountain and let the knight ride on. Then cross to the north-west corner of the square and take Calle de Ferraz for a short block to a side street, where a marquis left his house exactly as he lived in it.

10. 10. Museo Cerralbo: A Marquis's House, Untouched

    Calle de Ventura Rodríguez 17, 28008 Madrid, Spain

    On quiet Calle de Ventura Rodríguez, stop in front of the elegant townhouse with the iron gates and the stone staircase. From outside it looks like any aristocratic house of the 1890s. Inside, time simply stopped.

    It belonged to Enrique de Aguilera y Gamboa, the seventeenth Marquis of Cerralbo, a man of many passions. He was a politician, a leader of the Carlist movement that supported a rival branch of the royal family. He was a pioneering archaeologist, digging at sites in Soria and Guadalajara, where he found prehistoric remains including the bones of ancient elephants. And above all, he was a collector who could not stop.

    He built this palace between the 1880s and 1893 to live in with his collections. When he died in 1922 he left it to the state on one condition: that it be kept as he had arranged it. So the museum, opened in 1944, still looks like a home. Paintings hang frame to frame up to the ceiling, armour stands in the corners, porcelain fills the cabinets. There are tens of thousands of objects, and among the paintings is El Greco's Saint Francis in Ecstasy.

    Save some breath for the ballroom. Mirrors, gilding, painted ceilings and crystal chandeliers, all the glitter of Madrid high society at the end of the nineteenth century. Stand there and you can almost hear the orchestra tuning up.

    Many visitors fall in love with the smaller details: the bathroom with its original fittings, the desk where the Marquis wrote, the little objects he picked up on his travels. It feels less like a museum than like being shown round by a slightly eccentric uncle. From the door, walk west to the end of the street and across Calle de Ferraz into the park. The last stop is the oldest thing in Madrid by far.

11. 11. Templo de Debod: An Egyptian Temple at Sunset

    Calle de Ferraz 1, 28008 Madrid, Spain

    Walk across the grass to the edge of the long pool and look at what stands reflected in it: two stone gateways, and behind them a small temple of golden sandstone, carved with the gods of ancient Egypt. In a park in Madrid. Above a city of churches. It never stops being surreal.

    This is the Templo de Debod. It was begun in the second century before Christ by Adikhalamani, a king of Meroë in Nubia, and dedicated to the god Amun and the goddess Isis. Ptolemaic kings and later Roman emperors added rooms and carvings, so the walls carry the work of several dynasties. For more than two thousand years it stood on the banks of the Nile, south of Aswan.

    Then came the Aswan High Dam, and the rising waters threatened to drown the temples of Nubia. UNESCO launched an international rescue, and Spain sent archaeologists and money to help save monuments such as Abu Simbel. In thanks, Egypt gave Spain this temple in 1968. It was dismantled, shipped across the Mediterranean block by block, more than a thousand stones, and rebuilt here. It opened in 1972, facing east to west as it always had.

    The hill it stands on has a darker memory. Here stood the Cuartel de la Montaña, a large army barracks. In July 1936, at the start of the Civil War, officers inside joined the military uprising, and the barracks was besieged and stormed, with many killed. The ruined building was later cleared away, and the park and the temple now cover the site.

    Now turn to the west. This is the best sunset in Madrid: the sky over the Casa de Campo turns orange, then pink, the mountains of the Sierra darken on the horizon, and the old stones of Debod glow. From a poet's flowers to a pharaoh's gods... the walk ends here. Stay until the light goes.