Although it is neither very large nor very important, you won’t miss the Plaza Callao, which is crossed by the Gran Via, especially if you would like to see a film in Spanish, as there are six cinemas in the square. It also boasts buildings that were once the tallest in Spain.

The Palacio de la Pensa was built in 1929 and with its 14 storeys it was the tallest building in Madrid until the Telefonica Building surpassed it. The building houses a café, a concert hall and a cinema, as well as offices, private flats and the Madrid headquarters of the Socialist Party.

The Carrion Building was built in 1933 by the architects Eced and Feduchi in an Art Deco style of white marble and granite. It won a second class medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1934. Its cinema is on the ground floor. In 2007 the façade was restored and all the advertising slogans were removed, apart from the one for Schweppes, which is a symbol and has appeared in films and documentaries.

The Callao Cinema Building was built in 1927 by Louis Gutierrez Soto. It is a fine example of Spanish Neo-Baroque with a Viennese Art Deco interior. The terrace is used in fine weather for open-air film screenings. The first “talkie” in Spain was shown here in 1929.

While you are in Madrid, don’t miss a trip to the Edificio Telefonica on the Gran Via, which was once the tallest building in Europe.

The building was designed by Ignacio de Cardenas who based his plans on those of the American architect Lewis Weeks. The 90 metre high, 14 storey American-style skyscraper has nevertheless a Spanish Baroque façade of elaborately sculptured ornaments.

Since its construction in 1929 it has been a symbol of Madrid and was used during the civil war by the Republican army as a lookout for enemy troop movements and it housed the offices of the foreign press. Ernest Hemingway was one of the foreign journalists at the time and he got the inspiration of his famous book “For whom the bell tolls” here. Unfortunately, its height also made it an ideal target for bombing raids by Franco’s troops.

Today the building plays a more peaceful role in Spanish life. The first two floors are shopping malls where you can buy any and every kind of communications equipment. Other floors house the Museum of Telecommunication, the Technology Museum and an auditorium. Two other floors are given over to temporary Spanish art exhibitions. The rest of the building serves as office space.

On the corner of Calle de Alcala and the Gran Via, you will find another of Madrid’s famous landmarks: the Metropolis Building, one of the most photographed buildings in the city.

This graceful building was built in 1911 by the French architects Jules and Raymond Février after they won an architectural competition launched by the Union y el Fenix insurance company who owned the land.

The brothers gave the façade its lovely Beaux Arts style: the first floor balconies are separated by four pairs of Corinthian colonnades and above these are statues representing mining, industry, agriculture and commerce, sculpted by St Marceaux and Lambert.

The central dome is black with elaborate decorations in 24 carat gold-leaf. At the foot of the dome is a statue by Benlliure. On top of the dome once stood the Fenix symbol; a statue of a Phoenix with Ganymede on one of its wings, but this was removed in 1972 when Metropolis Seguros bought the building. Today the statue that graces the top of the dome is that of the winged goddess, Victoria.

Sadly over the years, the building had been damaged by pollution and pigeon excrement. Restoration work began in 1988 with particular care taken over the statues. The building was given a new roof and the façade was cleaned. The work took over seven years and nowadays cleaning is undertaken every year to keep this popular landmark as beautiful as the day it was inaugurated.

Not far from the Plaza de las Cibeles you will find the Circulo de Bellas Artes, a private, non-profit making cultural institution which first opened its doors in 1881. In 1921 it was declared the Centre for the Protection of Fine Arts and in 1981 it was listed as a National Historical Building.

The institution offers one of the most active cultural programmes in Madrid and is certainly worth an afternoon’s visit. You will find here something for everyone’s taste in the arts; in the exhibition rooms you can admire drawings, paintings, etchings, ceramics and photos from many famous artists and also from up and coming artists of today.

For film lovers there is a cinema, but if you prefer to see a play, you will also find a good theatre. There are concert and lecture halls and during the Madrid Carnival the famous Masked Ball is held here. Bookworms will love the Centre’s well-stocked library or you can play snooker in the Billiard Room on the third floor. There is a shop for souvenirs and a café/restaurant where you can enjoy a very good meal and tapas are served at all hours of the day.

Don’t miss a visit to the terrace, where there is a statue of Minerva and where you will be afforded a wonderful view of Madrid.

The Plaza de Cibeles is a square with a neo-classical complex of marble sculptures with fountains that has become an iconic symbol for the city of Madrid. The fountain of Cibeles is found in the part of Madrid commonly called the Paseo de Recoletos. It depicts the goddess Cibeles (Cybele), the Phrygian goddess of fertility, sitting on a chariot pulled by two lions. The fountain was built in the reign of Charles III and designed by Ventura Rodríguez between 1777 and 1782. Up until the 19th century both the fountain of Neptune and Cibeles looked directly at each other, until the city council decided to turn them round to face towards the centre of the city. The fountain of Cibeles has been adopted by the football team Real Madrid as the place to celebrate its triumphs in major competitions such as the Champions League, La Liga or Spanish Copa del Rey.

Of all the boulevards in Madrid, the loveliest and most visited is the Paseo del Prado and you will enjoy strolling along it from the Plaza Cibeles to the Plaza de Emperador Carlos V with the Plaza Canovas del Castillo in the middle.

The paseo is very wide with a tree-lined central strip filled with well-tended flower beds and benches where locals sit in the sun and gossip. Along this popular promenade you will find the Fountains of Neptune and Apollo, with more benches where you can sit for a while and listen to the sound of the fountains. The boulevard is well-kept and all morning city employees pick up litter, trim the hedges and pull out weeds and dead plants.

The boulevard is also called the Art Walk, for here you will find the three museums of the Golden Triangle: the Museo del Prado with its fine collection of 12th to 19th century European art – the most important collection in the world; the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza which houses what was once the largest private art collections in Spain, and the Museo Nacional Centro d’Art Reine Sofia with its important collection of contemporary Art.

You will also find the Puerto Real – the Royal Gate, one of the entrances to the Royal Botanical Gardens.

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, or in Spanish Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, is an art museum near the Prado Museum in Madrid. It is known as a part of the "Golden Triangle of Art", which also includes the Prado and the Reina Sofia galleries. The Thyssen-Bornemisza fills the historical gaps in its counterparts' collections: in the Prado's case this includes Italian primitives and works from the English, Dutch and German schools, while in the case of the Reina Sofia the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, once the second largest private collection in the world after the British Royal Collection, includes Impressionists, Expressionists, European and American paintings from the second half of the 20th century, with over 1,600 paintings. The competition was won after in 1986 Baron Thyssen having tried to enlarge his Museum in Villa Favorita and searched for a location in Europe. The collection started in the 1920s as a private collection by Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon (1875–1947).

When you visit the Plaza Canovas del Castillo, do make sure that your camera’s batteries aren’t low and that you have plenty of space for photos, as it would be a pity not to keep some of souvenirs of this lovely plaza.

Actually, “plaza” is rather a grand name for what is now Madrid’s most popular and most beautiful roundabout. Surrounded by impressive Baroque buildings, the centerpiece of the plaza is the fountain “Fuente de Neptuno”, a large basin with a statue of Neptune upon a conch-shell chariot drawn across the waves by two horses. The statue was designed by Ventura Rodriguez and sculpted in white marble by Juan Pascual Mena not long before his death in 1784.

Over a hundred years later, the plaza was renamed after Antonio Canovas del Castillo. Del Castillo was a Prime Minister of Spain in the 19th century. In 1876 he was the principal author of the Spanish Constitution and he spoke out for the freedom of religion.

Unfortunately, the statesman and historian also had a darker side to his character. The political legacy of his fervent opposition for the independence of Cuba led eventually to the Spanish-American War in 1898. In 1896 after a bomb exploded during a religious rally, he ordered the arrest and torture of over 300 men and women, many of them innocent. He was assassinated in 1897 by an Italian anarchist.

The Museo del Prado is a museum and art gallery located in Madrid, the capital of Spain. It features one of the world's finest collections of European art, from the 12th century to the early 19th century, based on the former Spanish Royal Collection. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture, it also contains important collections of more than 5,000 drawings, 2,000 prints, 1,000 coins and medals, and almost 2,000 decorative objects and works of art. Sculpture is represented by more than 700 works and by a smaller number of sculptural fragments. The painting collection comprises about 7,800 paintings, of which only about 1,300 are at public display, mainly because of the museum's lack of space. A new, recently opened wing enlarged the display area by about 400 paintings, and it is currently used mainly for temporary expositions. El Prado is one of the most visited sites in Madrid, and it is considered to be among the greatest museums of art in the world.

House museums are always an interesting way of learning about the life of the occupant and the Casa Museo Lope de Vega is no exception. You will find the museum in a charming three storey 17th century building in the street named after one of his fellow playwrights – Cervantes. Lope de Vega spent the last 25 years of his life in this house where he wrote several rather religious-minded plays and poems. The furniture and ornaments, while typical of late 16th and early 17th century Spain, are nonetheless reproductions of Lope de Vega’s actual furniture and personal belongings – the originals were divided among his children after his death in 1635. This doesn’t take anything away from the charm of this small museum, which depicts life in the Golden Age of Baroque Literature. The gardens are lovely, with a well and fruit trees that Lope de Vegas mentions in his diaries. Lope de Vega is little known outside Spain, where he is considered one of the greatest writers of Western literature. During his life he wrote over 1800 plays, 9 epic poems, 7 novels and novellas and over 3000 sonnets. He had a very complicated love life: he was married twice, but had several children by various mistresses. Even when he joined the priesthood in 1614 he kept up his romantic trysts!

Plaza de Santa Ana is a plaza located in central Madrid, Spain, nearby Puerta del Sol and Calle de Huertas, in the Barrio de las Letras. It features monuments to Spanish Golden Age writer Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the Grenadian poet Federico García Lorca and numerous restaurants, cafes and tapas bars, with its terraces covering most of the sides surfaces. Teatro Español, the oldest theater in Madrid, is located on the plaza's east side. It was built in seventeenth century and then had the name Corral de la Pacheca, and Príncipe. On the west side of the plaza, a luxury hotel (now ME Madrid Reina Victoria) was built in the early nineteenth century. The hotel achieved fame for being the favorite among the most popular bullfighters. For example, the regular guest Manolete always reserved room number 220 in superstition. The plaza is a popular meeting point in Madrid.