Explore Madrid in Google Street View

Madrid became the capital in 1561 for a reason that still shapes how it looks: it was in the middle. Philip II wanted a court at the geographical centre of the peninsula rather than in any of the existing power cities, so the capital was placed on a plateau six hundred and fifty metres up with no river worth the name and no natural reason to be there. Everything since has been built deliberately, which is why the grand set pieces feel planned and the older quarters feel squeezed in behind them.

The altitude is the thing you notice on screen without knowing why. Madrid is the highest capital in Europe and the light is harder and the sky is bigger than in coastal cities, so the imagery has a clarity that Barcelona and Lisbon do not. Shadows are sharper, distances read further, and the long straight avenues actually go somewhere you can see.

Start in Plaza Mayor, which is enclosed on all four sides with nine arched entrances and nothing in the middle. It was built as a stage: executions, bullfights, markets and royal announcements all happened in this rectangle, and the uniform frontage exists so that everyone in the surrounding balconies had the same view. Walk out through the Arco de Cuchilleros and the city drops immediately into narrow lanes, which is the fastest way to feel how the old town works.

Gran Vía is the other Madrid. Driven through the medieval fabric between 1910 and 1929, it demolished around three hundred buildings and fourteen streets to make one, and the result is a canyon of early twentieth-century commercial architecture that has more in common with Chicago than with the rest of the city. It is best opened at the Metropolis building end and followed west, because the buildings get steadily taller and stranger.

For the parts people live in rather than visit, go to Malasaña and La Latina. Both are dense, both are low, and both were laid out before anybody planned anything, so the streets bend for no visible reason. La Latina is the one with the Sunday market and the most surviving eighteenth-century frontage; Malasaña is where the balconies are hung with plants and the ground floors are all bars.

Retiro is worth a separate visit and is largely covered on foot. It was a royal private garden until 1868 and only then opened to the public, which is why it is walled and formal rather than a piece of leftover land. The Palacio de Cristal inside it is a glasshouse built in 1887 for an exhibition of Philippine plants, standing on its own beside a small lake, and it is the single most photogenic thing in Madrid.