Results tagged “Madrid” from Intelligent Travel Blog

I arrived in Madrid a few weeks ago with only a handful of hours on a Saturday to show my fiancé around town, so I wanted a way to pack in as much culture as we could, and if possible, do it on the cheap. Enter my colleague Meg Weaver's excellent Free City Guide to Madrid, where I found a slew of cost-efficient ways to wander the city. With her list and a few of our own discoveries along the way, we were able to make our limited stay a memorable one, and save a few euros in the process.

Our first stop was the CaixaForum Madrid gallery, a former electric power station that's now a funky art space situated along the Paseo del Prado, tucked among some of the city's best museums. We wandered the current exhibit, took a break at the thoroughly modern cafe upstairs, then marveled at the living wall of plant life that's overtaken the exterior of the building next door. The admission is always free, so it should certainly join the must-see list for those visiting the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Museo del Prado, which is where we were headed next.

Admission is free for visitors to the Reina Sofia after 2:30 p.m. on Saturdays and until 2:30 p.m. on Sundays, so we ducked in there first, taking the very-cool elevators up to see Picasso's Guérnica, which is always captivating. We spent awhile wandering the halls of modern art before heading over to the historic stuff at the Prado, whose immense galleries filled with works by Goya, Reubens, and Velásques constituted an entire semester's worth of study for one of my college roommates when she studied abroad in the city. But we only had two hours, as the Prado offers free admission from 6 p.m to 8 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday (and from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday). Thankfully, that was more than enough time to take in some of the museum's more famous works like Las Meninas and The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid.

Lawrence Ferber timed his visit to Rio de Janeiro well, arriving just in time for the announcement that the city won its Olympic bid for 2016. He sends along a dispatch from the weekend's festivities.
 
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - Obrigado, Olympics Committee! A geyser-like spray of silver confetti greeted the announcement that Rio won the bid to host the 2016 Olympics, and the glittering cloud engulfed the jubilant crowd of Cariocas who had gathered in front of the Copacabana Beach stage, flanked by giant TV screens, to take in the news and par-tay.

With the famed Copacabana Palace Hotel looming to the left, and the ocean to the right, the celebration was one big samba, with music and local celebrities keeping everyone entertained. But come 1:30 p.m. the televised proceedings from Copenhagen held us rapt. Rio had lost its 2012 Olympics bid (and at least two others before it), but now following a two-year campaign it had beat out second front-runner Madrid (which was booed when the name came up during the announcement), Tokyo, and Chicago. Not quite gingerly but politely enough, many Brazilians, and even some North American visitors, remarked that Chicago would have been a boring choice - "it's South America's time!" nodded one visiting American journalist.

Madrid recently kicked off its 24th annual Veranos de la Villa (Summers in the City), 60 days of music, dance, theater, flamenco and much more.

The 1,166 events, held daily through August 23rd, include 65 concerts, 50 plays, myriad ballet performances, 200 films, and two circuses (!); many of which are free to attend.
 
Performers run the gamut from pop to classical, and represent Spain, America, Brazil, Germany, England. Among them are Sara Baras, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Cesária Évoria, Gilberto Gil, Carlos Saura, James Taylor, Lou Reed, Kool & the Gang, Seal, and the Opera Ballet of Munich.
   
Venues include the 16th-century Plaza Mayor, the city's gardens, and the 4th-century BC Egyptian Templo de Debod (Temple of Debod). There'll even be open-air screenings of top movie hits such as Ché, Gran Torino, Slum Dog Millionaire, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Looking for more free things to do in Madrid? Check out Traveler's guide to Free Things to Do year-round in Madrid.

Madrid's Prado Museum has long been home to a wide range of artistic masterpieces and is a must-see for anyone who happens to find themselves in its vicinity. When I studied in Madrid, I visited the Prado on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis! But now you don't have to travel to Spain to appreciate the museum's most famous paintings. The Independent reports on how the Prado has teamed up with Google Earth to create a project that allows users to zoom in on select masterpieces that have been photographed section by section in "mega high resolution" then stitched together digitally. Though this viewing process is hardly as electrifying as looking at the paintings in person, the high resolution of the images allows people to zero in on the most intricate details, which is impossible to do when faced with the paintings in real life.

"It's a unique vision. In the museum we cannot get this close to a painting; if we did we'd need a three-metre-high ladder to get these views," says Google Spain's Clara Ribera.