EUROPE FOR FREE : CITY: SECTION :

sometimes free

Any day on which entrance to a normally pricey sight is free is never a secret. Expect a crush of visitors, especially of schools on class trips and other cash-strapped groups. Sure you get in for free, but the crowds may not make it worth your while. At the very least, try to show up when the doors open so you can be at the head of the surging masses. Caveat emptor.

Note that, officially, these days of free admission are for EU citizens only, but the ticket booths rarely seem to enforce this policy and just let everyone glide in for free.

FREE ON WEDNESDAY
Palacio Real
Built in 1764 on the site of the immolated Alcazar, Madrid's 3,000-room Royal Palace contains the usual hyper-luxurious kingly appointments and furnishings, frescoes by Tiepolo, a pretty wicked Arms and Armour collection (Charles V's marauding troops kitted out in these gigs), and a genuinely interesting historic pharamacy. And hey, if you're here at noon on the first Wednesday to the month you get to the see the changing of the guard in the long, colonnated courtyard.

Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales
Felipe II's sister Juana de Austria (already widowed of Prince Don Juan of Portugal by the time she was but 19 years old) was in some ways as pious as her brother, and she founded this nunnery for the Poor Clares in the 1500s. However, this was no harsh convent for the brides of Christ, but rather a sort of religious retreat for the daughters of nobility where they could spend time safely squirreled away from the wiles of men until their fathers could seal the deal on whom they would marry. At least at this "Monastery of the Barefoot Royals" they had a surfeit of tapestries, frescoes, and a nice variety of art to admire while they awaited their nuptial fates, including canvases by Titian, Breughel the Elder, and Rubens. You, too, can admire them on the requisite guided tours, provided you do so quickly (the guides insist upon taking everyone through at a dead trot).

Museo Lázaro Galdiano
The early 20th century mansion of this author and financial guru is now open to the public, so we can all admire his taste in medieval silversmithy and carved ivories, and paintings by Goya, Ribera, El Greco, Zubar?n, Tiepolo, Constable, Gainsborough, Murillo, and even one bona fide Leonardo da Vinci.

Panteón de Goya (Goya's Tomb)
Francesco de Goya decorated this chapel in 1797 with scenes from the Life of St. Anthony (populated, of course, by members of the contemporary Spanish court). The great, rather disturbed 18th century Spanish genius was later buried here (or at least his body was, Bordeaux, where he died, has managed to hold on to his head).

Museo Municipal
In a former poorhouse with an elaborate Churrigueresque (rococo) facade, this museum traces the history of the city of Madrid (conveniently, it's got some Roman mosaics in the basement). Frankly, it's probably most interesting to true history buffs, though the scale models of the city at different eras do help one understand how Madrid developed into the overly-sprawling urban center it has now become.

FREE ON SATURDAY AFTER 2:30PM
Museo del Prado
One of the world's greatest painting galleries, easily up there with the Louvre, Uffizi, London's National Gallery, Vatican, or Metropolitan?just not as well known (largely due to Spain's largely falling off the tourism radar during the decades of Franco's rule). It covers art from the 12th through the 18th centuries, strongest, as you might imagine, on Spanish masters, though there are also excellent works by Titian, D?rer, Rubens, and Tintoretto.

Even the Prado's second most famous painting is one of several on display by Hieronymus Bosch ("El Bosco"), the delirious and disturbing Garden of Earthly Delights which many people liken to a 14th century forerunner to surrealism (it's not, as Surrealism was pointedly anti-symbolic, and Bosch's work is entirely interpretative of Catholic symbolism, but these are just art theory semantics; sufficeth to say that these are works even Dal? would probably look at and say "That's really warped, man!").

But on to the Spaniards. There are plenty by the Caravaggiesque masters Zubar?n, master of flickering candlelight, and Jose Ribera, master of wrinkly-browed St. Jeromes, as well as by Murillo and El Greco, who was a Greek (where he was steeped in Christian Orthodoxy) who came to Spain via Florence (where he picked up Mannerism's wispy, twisty figures) and Venice (where he discovered Titian's color palette), but after he settled in Toledo (where he mixed it all together into an instantly recognizable and unique late Renaissance style) became sort of an honorary Spaniard.

The gaggles of Goyas (1746-1828)—there are more than 100—trace his long, slow decent into a depressed madness, from his early scenes of pastel-cheeked youth frolicking and laughing in bucolic landscapes (Parasol) and his stint as a court painter (Family of Charles VI) to a stretch when he painted controversial (the famed Clothed Maja and Naked Maja), often politically-charged works (Third of May, 1808: Execution) in a harsher style, and his late "Black Paintings" period, a series of somber, bloody, breathless paintings (check out Jupiter ripping his son's head off with his teeth) that he painted on the walls of his house and which are just crying out for some serious couch time with a good therapist. (Instead, he moved to Bordeaux, where at least judging by The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, he managed to find a happier life in his final years.)

But pride of place in the Prado goes to the works of Diego Velázquez, most especially Las Meninas, a courtly portrait group disarming in its intimacy and the little tricks the artist uses to draw us in (or rather, to project the painting's space out into our reality). It's painted as a sort-of backwards scene: there's a crowd of courtiers and nobles?including the chil-princess Infanta Margherita, a court dwarf, and a sleepy dog?gathered around Velazquez, who stands in front of an easel, staring out at us as he decides what to do next. If you look at the mirror on the far wall of the painting, reflected in it are two ghostly figures: that's the King and Queen, whose portrait Velazquez is supposedly painting, and, given the composition of the whole scene, who must be standing there right at your elbow. The painting is hung just at the right level in a rooms custom-built for it so as to make the room we're standing in appear to continue into the painting's space.

Centro de Arte Reina Sof?a
Madrid's modern art museum has the usual mix of sometimes intriguing, sometimes whimsical, often ridiculous and pointlessly self-important art from the last half of the 20th century, as well as a cache of mediocre works by Dalí, Mir?, and Juan Gris, but it draws the crowds for Picasso's masterpiece Guernica, a vast and disturbing artistic condemnation of the terrible 1937 massacre when Generalissimo Franco invited his buddy Hitler to test his luftwaffe bombers by leveling this Basque town during Spain's bloody Civil War. Anyone accustomed to scoffing at Picasso's style as child-like will come away with a whole new respect for just how powerful his style could be. The Guernica room is also full of some of the many studies and sketches Picasso did for the work, offering a unique insight into his artistic process.

Museo Archeológico Nacional
Madrid's underrated archaeological museum includes artifacts from prehistory through the Middle Ages, largely Iberian but with some Greek and Egyptian stuff thrown in for good measure. There's also a slightly cheesy mock-up of the Caves of Altamira and their 15,000-year-old paintings.

FREE ON SUNDAY
Museo del Prado
(See above).

Museo de Am?rica
Lest we forget that the Spanish were the first conquistadores of North, Central, and South America, these rich ethnographic collections of pre-Columbian (and Filipino) artifacts remind us of how wonderful, advanced, and aesthetically diverse were those cultures that the great European explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries systematically plundered, looted, and robbed. To the museum's credit it goes to great pains to try and reveal and recreate a true sense the cultures, lifestyles, and vanished societies that produced these objects.

Museo de Artes Decorativas
A vast survey of Spanish tastes in interior d?cor and objets d'art from the 15th through the 19th centuries (though five whole floors of ornate candlesticks and fancy furnishings can get to be a bit much).

Museo Sorolla
He wasn't the greatest of Spanish painters, but Valencian Joaquiin Sorolla (1863-1923) produced some fine canvases, many preserved here (alongside his prodigious ceramics collection) in the house-cum-studio he live din during his final 11 years.

Museo Rom?ntico
Not as romantic as it sounds, but rather Romantic, a hodgepodge of antique furnishings, tchochkies, and Goyas cobbled together according to the aesthetics of the late 19th century.

Museo Municipal
(See above).