Madrid

Madrid is an easy enough place to eat vegan, so long as you have a kitchen available to you – if you want to eat cheaply. I stayed at the Barbieri International Hostel (which doesn’t look quite like that anymore) which had a well stocked kitchen, down to seemingly communal garlic & salt, always a plus. For the four nights I stayed, I live on bean & pasta bolognaise, making a panful on the Monday & portioning it out through the week.

One thing to look out for when it comes to beans is the propensity for Spaniards to put chorizo in everything. A lot of the tinned beans come with the happy addition of meat, but one or two of the brands packaged in glass jars are sausage-less.

Aside from taking morning Spanish lessons at International House, I spent a lot of time at the Reina Sofia art gallery & the Parque del Retiro. The Reina Sofia is free most evenings & well worth a couple of visits. I had the luck to catch ‘The Frenzied Alphabet’ exhibition showing the works of Leon Ferrari & Mira Schendel who both worked with language & linguistics as their medium, addressing the nature of the word & its visual appearance even through absence…The works ranged from sheets covered with language to thin blank sheets made into knots & sculptures & Ferrari moves into more obvious political statements in his later pieces when he places military iconography over religious scenes but I massively preferred the focus on language & writing.

The Parque del Retiro proved a pleasant place to spend my afternoons reading or playing poi, & exploring. It’s split into well-kept rose gardens, more unkempt ramble worthy areas, kids’ play areas & little forests, as well as glass palaces, one of which was being used to house an addendum to an exhibition at the Reina Sofia. As I first approached the Parque, I had thought the botanical gardens were a part & paid roughly €5 or so to splash around near some labelled plants, discovering sculptures & cats among the tropical trees. They also really like their ornamental cauliflowers…

Madrid is ridiculously small & I didn’t use the metro after the first day of orientating myself. It depends if you think 45 minutes absorbing a city above ground is worth it.

One afternoon I walked out to the Teleferico – a cable car – to find that it’s only open on the weekends in Febuary. The park which houses this was not a patch on the Retiro, either, as there are roads through it & a railway nearby, so not too calming & pleasant. There was a great view of the palace & cathedral from the top of the hill though.

On my last day in Madrid, I had to move to other accommodation & stayed with a little old lady in her flat & so did not have a kitchen. I’d found a few vegan places via Happy Cow to seek out & as I wandered the alleys near the Retiro found Huertas, the Viva La Vida buffet & shop, a review of which can be found on the blog.

As ever, drop me an email or comment if you have anything to add!