Upon announcing that we would be visiting Madrid instead of Barcelona when heading to Spain, we were warned many times over that we were making a huge mistake: It had no sights or attractions of any real interest and was boring; the people were unfriendly; the food wasn’t great; it was more of a “living” city rather than a “visiting” one; and—perhaps most ironically—the capital city was the least Spanish city in Spain. If there are any certainties in this life, it seemed the absolute inferiority of Madrid to the cultural capital, Barcelona, was one of them, and we were utter fools for heading to the one place in Spain that apparently no one seemed to like.
But we had to be pragmatic—with our time winding down in Europe and our exit flights back to Canada already purchased out of Lisbon, we needed to limit our time in Spain to a part of the country that would allow us to easily (and affordably) make our way to our final stop on this phase of our trip. As appealing as Barcelona sounded, from a practical standpoint, Madrid just made more sense. In a perfect world, we would have visited both, but with the high speed train between the two cities costing what it does (hint: high speeds come at high prices) and the bus journey still costing a fair amount and eating up the good portion of a day, a choice had to be made and so we chose to ignore group wisdom and booked five nights in Madrid. After all, we reasoned, if we hated it, it was close enough to cities like Toledo and Segovia that we could easily eat up our time with day trips elsewhere.
Steph and Tony are currently in the USA.