The Landscape of Light

Plaza de Cibeles

The goddess Cybele rides her lion chariot at the head of the Paseo del Prado, surrounded by four landmark buildings. The fountain, carved in white marble in 1782, faces the wedding-cake façade of the Palacio de Cibeles.

You are standing at the northern gate of the Paseo del Prado, on a square named for the goddess at its center. Cybele rides a chariot pulled by two lions, carved in white marble from Montesclaros and installed here in 1782. Ventura Rodríguez designed the fountain, and it has been an emblem of Madrid ever since. Look around.

Four buildings frame the square: the Bank of Spain, the Buenavista Palace, the Linares Palace, and directly ahead of you the Palacio de Cibeles. That one, with its white neo-Plateresque façade and corner towers, opened in 1919 as the main post office. People called it the Cathedral of Communications. Today it is Madrid's city hall.

Step closer and find the iron-and-glass canopy over the old operations courtyard, now a public cultural center. The real subject of this walk begins behind you: the Paseo del Prado, a tree-lined avenue laid out in the sixteenth century as a place where anyone, regardless of class, could walk in the shade. UNESCO inscribed it as a cultural landscape in 2021, calling it the prototype of the Hispanic alameda. When you are ready, turn south and begin walking down Paseo del Prado.

The boulevard descends gently. Keep to the right-hand sidewalk.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

The Thyssen collection fills the Palacio de Villahermosa, an eighteenth-century ducal residence with a pink-and-cream neoclassical façade. Its door sits directly on the Paseo del Prado sidewalk.

You are looking at the Palacio de Villahermosa, an eighteenth-century ducal residence that became the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1992. The building is neoclassical, symmetrical, dressed in pale pink and cream. It reads as a palace because it was one. The Thyssen collection arrived here after the Spanish government bought it from Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, filling a gap between the Prado's old masters and the Reina Sofía's twentieth century.

But you are not going inside today. Notice how the entrance sits flush with the boulevard, unlike the Prado farther south, which pulls back behind a plaza and a statue. This palace was built when the Paseo was already a fashionable address, and its architect pressed it right up to the promenade. Above the cornice, a balustrade runs the length of the roofline.

Count the windows: three stories, seven bays. The rhythm is calm and unshowy. Next, continue south. The Neptune fountain is about two hundred meters ahead, in the middle of the next roundabout.