Boutique Hotels in Madrid

The reason to come is the art, and it sits in three buildings within ten minutes of each other on the Paseo del Prado. The Prado holds the deepest collection of European painting anywhere — Velázquez's Las Meninas, the dark Goyas, Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights; the Reina Sofía, at the boulevard's southern end, has Picasso's Guernica; and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, across the road, fills the centuries in between. Go in the free evening windows, when the daytime crowds have thinned. Beyond the museums lie the set-pieces: the Royal Palace, the largest in western Europe; the arcaded Plaza Mayor; the green sweep of the Retiro, with its boating lake and glass palace; and the Temple of Debod, a real Egyptian temple that catches the city's best sunset.

But Madrid is read through its barrios. La Latina, medieval and tavern-lined along Calle Cava Baja, is the tapas heart, at its best when the Sunday Rastro flea market spills into a long afternoon of vermouth around Plaza de la Paja. Malasaña is young and contrary, Chueca stylish, Lavapiés the immigrant melting pot, and grand Salamanca the address for the designer mile. When the city has had enough of itself, the great Castilian towns of Toledo and Segovia are half an hour away by fast train.

Madrid eats late and eats well, and it does so on two levels. There are the old Castilian houses roasting suckling pig and lamb in wood ovens — Botín, going since 1725 and reckoned the oldest restaurant on earth — and there is the tapas bar, where the real life of the city happens standing up: a glass of wine, a plate of jamón or a tortilla, then on to the next. Graze the Mercado de San Miguel, order cocido madrileño when the weather turns, and finish, as the city has for generations, with chocolate and churros at San Ginés at an indecent hour. Dinner at ten is normal; the bars go later; the energy is the point.

For where to stay, the club's choice puts you in the thick of it: Only YOU Boutique, a design hotel in a nineteenth-century palace in Chueca, among the best of the central barrios for eating and drinking, and a short walk from the Gran Vía and the Golden Triangle. It is the kind of base that suits a city best explored on foot and late at night.

Madrid sits high and dry on the meseta, which makes its seasons emphatic and the timing worth getting right. May, June, September and early October are the sweet spot — warm, clear days and long evenings made for the terraces, without the extremes. July and August are fierce, often past forty degrees, and in August the city half-empties as madrileños flee and smaller places shut for weeks; quieter and cheaper, but with the life drained out of it. Winter is cold, bright and crisp — museum weather, cocido weather, with the clear high-altitude light at its best and the Christmas lights up. For Madrid at its most liveable, come in late spring or early autumn, and leave the evenings unplanned.