Today was a free day for us to explore the city by ourselves. We left the hotel at 8am and walked over to the cathedral.
Then we walked all the way back past the hotel and off in the other direction and all the way to the Prado Museum. We stopped along the way for coffee and reached the Prado by 10am, so we'd already been walking for about 2 hours before we got in there. The Prado is called a Museum but in fact it's an art gallery. We spent the next few hours looking at works by Picasso, El Greco, Velasquez and some extremely weird paintings by Goya. Unforunately, photography was not allowed inside the Prado and I forgot to take a photo of the outside. We then walked around the Madrid Botanical gardens and on to an absolutely enormous park called the Retiro. Somewhere in the park there was supposed to be a crystal palace, but we kept getting lost and it took us about an hour to find it.
It then took us even longer to find our way out of the park again. By this time we were exhausted, so we stopped at a Tapas place for an early supper. Then we walked on to the plaza Santa Ana where we were booked into a flamenco performance. However, when we got there they told us the performance was canceled and asked us to wait for the next one (in 1.5 hours). We were far too exhausted to do this so we asked for a refund instead and returned to the hotel. Tonight we are packing as we are on an early flight to Heathrow in the morning, to start the final part of our trip (in the UK).
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