Postcard of the Week: The Royal Palace, Madrid
One of my favourite past-times is losing myself in a daydream inside palaces, castles and stately homes. I start to imagine myself gliding through opulent room upon opulent room, surrounded by renaissance masterpieces in all directions, peering out of tall, thin windows looking down onto perfectly tended gardens and fountains, exploring secret corridors and endless staircases. Madrid’s Royal Palace, el Palacio Real, is no exception to this. It’s no longer inhabited by the Spanish royal family, who instead live in the Palacio de la Zarzuela on the outskirts of the capital.
For €10, you can look round the main reception rooms, the absolutely enormous banquet hall, whose dining table took my breath away, the throne room and some others. The ticket also includes entry to the Royal Armoury which transported my daydream into a world of medieval knights in a jousting tournament, a la Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale.
The very best bit about Madrid’s Royal Palace, as opposed to the ridiculously over-crowded Chateau de Versailles (see my Postcard of the Week: Chateau de Versailles), is that even on a Saturday we practically had the whole place to ourselves! All the better for daydreaming…
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