Madrid

Hi everyone, just adding a little bit of detail about our 3 days in Madrid arriving around 11am on the train from Cordoba.  Took the metro from the main train station (which was huge, bigger than a lot of airports we've been to) to the area where our accommodation was.
Our guesthouse was quite close to the historic centre within walking distance of the Royal Palace and it's magnificent grounds and the Plaza Mayor which is a central part of Madrid.

 

This top pic shows only this half of the palace, there was an equal amount of the building on the other side.  We don't have the camera equipment to capture the full size of a lot of the buildings as mostly they are so huge it is hard to take it all in while standing there.  The second pic is of the side of the palace with some of the gardens in the foreground.

We spent lots of time walking and enjoying all the bustle of a big city and found our way to one of the bigger parks in the city that has a large pond contained within its grounds. We had really nice weather for our visit to Madrid with the last day getting to 29 degrees.

We took in a museum while there which as always was fascinating, what was also fascinating was the vertical garden on the wall of the building outside the museum.

We took a day trip to a town close by to Madrid called Toledo.  The town has been deemed a Unesco world heritage site.  It is an ancient city perched on top of a mountain and was known as a fortified city where the city walls ran around the entire town so as to keep guard and to see any approaching armies. We took the fast train the 75 kms and  took 33 minutes to travel there.  We had a really enjoyable few hours having a wander around and checking out all the ancient architecture there and then did the fast train back to Madrid to enjoy our last night there before travelling on to Zaragoza to the north of Madrid.  

On our last night in Madrid we had a walk up to the Plaza Mayor to see if there was much happening there and on the way we found another quite famous Madrid attraction called the San Miguel Market.  It is a really cool market with some isles having fresh food for sale, other isles having Tapas and also bars for drinks and sweets.  It was a really nice way to end our few days in Madrid.

So off to our next stop in Zaragoza about 300 kms to the north east of Madrid of course on another high speed train.  Will bring you some pics of our visit there when time permits. Seems amazing to think that we are getting to the end of the Spain/Portugal stage of our travels.

Stay safe everyone as we will on our travels.