For anyone planning a visit to Spain, I can't recommend Madrid highly enough. I wasn't sure what to expect from the city, but it might be my favorite I've ever been to. Madrid is beautiful, clean, walkable, and very welcoming. The food was all amazing and it seemed like we never had to wait for a table. I had a great time in Barcelona, but I'd recommend Madrid over Barcelona in a heartbeat.
Madrid is indeed very nice. Perfect destination in early spring or late autumn as winters are very short there. Avoid in the summer as it gets stupidly hot there. One reason I like it is that it's far away from the beaches and package tourists. It's a huge modern city. And there's plenty to see. I love the public parks there. There's a huge new park on top of the inner ring road which they partially covered up. Perfect place to hang out on a warm day. Also did wonders for the nearby neighborhood which are now quiet and a lot less smelly than they used to be.
There are a couple of other museums well worth visiting near El Prado. El Prado can get very busy because it's on everybody's list of things to visit. I've been there on a quiet day at some point and it's very enjoyable. But when you have to queue up for 45 minutes just to get in, it's probably a lot less nice. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum has a pretty amazing collection and is right across the street. And down the street is the Reina Sofia, which has a nice modern art collection (think lots of Miro, Picasso, Dali, etc.).
If you have time and a car, driving around Spain is very enjoyable. I've seen most of it's larger and smaller cities over the years.
Sure, between the bigger cities, the train is amazing. I did Valencia to Madrid by high speed rail in 2022 for example. Works great. The average speed is close to the maximum speed of the train; it only slows down to stop.
But for the more rural regions and smaller cities, you pretty much need a car.
the roads are really great, they're kept in great shape. The train, although Madrid centric is amazing as well, stupidly fast and not that expensive anymore.
I recommend Madrid as well. I still haven't made it to Barcelona but I did visit the Spanish Riviera also known as the Costa del Sol. I stayed in Torremolinos where a lot of English winter and there were a lot of American sailors in the bars as well. Its a short distance to Malaga which was interesting.
Also went West and caught a boat to Tangiers in Morocco for a day trip. It was my first time experiencing culture shock. Tangiers was so different from either America or Europe. I made friends with two Danish soldiers and the three of us explored the Casbah together. It was also the first (and last!) time that I ate a sheep's eyeball! Little kids everywhere were begging for money. I understood perfectly why they spoke to me in English. But when they found out my friends were from Denmark they switched to speaking perfect Danish! These kids knew a smattering of a dozen languages or more.
Tech workers here are paid so much less than they should be; there's tons of unemployment only to earn 15k/yr when theyre at work. Salaries like this are a joke and should rise
No, your avg tech worker is not going to be making 15k/yr. Maybe around 40k/yr and that would be an "average" salary for a non-senior position.
Both of you are wrong for different reasons. The truth is more nuanced.
First, Madrid is very different from the rest of the country. Salaries are higher, still half of what our neighbors of the north have. 15k/20k sounds like a rest-of-the-country average.
Even in Madrid 40k€ is far from average, that it's more likely 28k.
40 is the salary for a very senior o very specialized programmer/analyst.
But there's a caveat that makes you closer to reality for Madrid and it's if you add forced pension and health insurance that the employer pays. It's around 40% on top of the raw salary, so someone earning 30k is really costing 42k to the employer.
What a weird take to defend tech salaries in Spain, I'd love to move but the very top salaries for my level cap around 80-90k EUR so it'd be quite a big drop even compared to the UK
Where do you read a defense of anything? This is not a "weird take", just a statement of a fact (may it be true or false): that the average is ~40k and not ~15k (it is currently illegal to pay less than 15.876 euros per year).
But be aware that the London salaries upper tail is wider, possibly brought up by the quant firms (which are a different kind of company than most are accustomed)
levels.fyi gives 112kE as the median and 200kE/90% for London vs around 60kE for the median and 90kE/90% (pretax for both)
I’m glad more and more people are realizing. Preferring it over Barcelona is very personal; I completely get people who prefer a coastal city as beautiful as the Ciudad Condal. But Madrid was underrated for ages. It’s sunny, beautiful, safe, fun, imperial. Luckily it’s been booming for a while now.
I get your point, but that's not exactly the case. Madrid is built there not by coincidence, there are a lot of underground rivers that cross the region, but then the city was built on top of them.
Amazing! At Cava Baja 10 there's a remnant of the wall... and I never knew, I stay at the hotel across the street whenever I'm in Madrid and face that building.
Ironically, my comment about ruins, rivers, etc, I lifted from a sign in the lobby of that very hotel. And here they are sitting on top of it ;)
There is stuff to see and do in Madrid for months, but Madrid is the center in a cobweb of roads. This means that maybe 40% of the country or so is reachable from here in a reasonable time.
Distances in Spain are different than in US. Some cities are connected from here in an interval of less than two hours (one-way) by fast train AVE so reserving one day to explore another city as a bonus is doable with some extra work. This comprises Valencia, Salamanca, Burgos or Cordoba. You could basically go from one point to the other coin of Iberia in a day by train if you don't mind to burn a day looking at the landscape. Or sleep in the train and wake up in a different coastal city in a different Sea. Is just a question of money and planning.
In the same way if you go to Barcelona I would strongly advise to explore near destinations in Pyrenees or the South of France also.
I loved them both for different reasons, I went last year for the first time. As another commenter said Madrid felt very imperial, and as you say was beautiful, clean, and walkable. Barcelona felt more arty and had a great coastal vibe to it. I would go back to either in a heartbeat!
We moved to Madrid a few years ago. Summers are incredibly long and unbearable, to be honest, and it's not getting better. We have a 2 year old daughter and it sucks not being able to take her to the park for weeks because it's scorching hot.
Other than that, we like the city, and especially our neighbourhood.
That’s 80% of the country you’re describing there. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t do a siesta in summer, and elderly people continue throughout the year
I have met many foreigners from Northern countries who made fun of siesta... until they stayed in Spain for a summer, then they understood it very quickly xD
I'd recommend Valencia in addition to Madrid. I can't say I enjoyed Barcelona that much, it felt too touristy. Valencia had a wonderful balance of tourism, low prices, food, and waterfront.
Honestly, they’re all great. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville and Bilbao.
I had almost no idea about Spain before I moved to Europe and soon realised that it is a friendly place with amazing reasonably priced food and some of the most amazing artwork. Every new city has these qualities and adds its own stories and beautiful architecture.
Also Spain is to gin and tonic what New York is to pizza and Australia/New Zealand are to coffee: they did not invent it, but they certainly perfected it. a giant fish bowl of gin mare and good tonic water filled with ice and maybe some rosemary for scent.
I am from Spain and your last paragraph made me chuckle.
Not that long ago gin and tonic was considered an old person's drink and there were very few brands available, but 10~15 years ago it exploded in popularity. All of sudden you could find a million brands of gin and another million of tonic water, even in small villages, and bartenders started to take its preparation quite seriously.
And of course I have several friends who brag about drinking it before it was cool xD
It's cool to have a virtual tour of open gallery space, but it would be orders of magnitude cooler to have a virtual tour of the works in a museum's collection that are not on view.
Most museums are only able to show a few dozen or hundred works in their galleries at a time, but store thousands of works in their collection. In an effort to accommodate this reality, many museums publish a freely available database of their collection. There isn't really a standard practice for creating, maintaining, and publishing these databases, so it really depends on each museum's collections team to do that work; and it will always be a relatively low priority. Digital exhibitions could radically change that.
> The entire deposit collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (more than 151,000 objects housed together, arranged in fourteen storage compartments with five different climates) is stored here and is publicly accessible, on a total floor area of 15,541 m2.
You should probably have a tour guide on your first time there. Personally I was a bit confused which of the climate-controlled rooms I was actually allowed to enter (the doors all look like highly secure entrypoints). So I felt like I missed out on some exhibits and only scratched the surface of what they had on display (vs. in a filing cabinet).
Apple has one of those tours for their museum.[1]
Apple used to be big on that. They called it "Quicktime VR"(1998) [2]
The main application today is real estate sales.[3]
I know that not everybody has time, money, opportunity, etc. to go to Del Prado to see art with their own eyes but I have to say that seeing photos on my monitor before and seeing it in reality were completely different and not not transferable experiences. The light, those details and often even size of the canvas which is measured in meters and not centimeters are all incredible. For example Las Meninas is basically 3x3 meters or you can easily spend 1 hour looking at The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch. I will remember this visit till the end of my life.
It’s not said enough:
Screens = tiny mass produced lights
Paintings = A masterful mix of usually expensive substances carefully selected for the unique way in which they reflect light.
I may be biaised but I believe this "tour" is not good. Not immersive enough. Just not really something we want as client.
- The moving/walking part is just bad. Even Matterport does much better with its technology.
Feels a lot better when there is a simple Ui to cycle through the views, keyboard and mouse navigation locked on the y axis, and gaussians just look better. Pretty heavy though if the space is large.
Thanks faloon for the link. It's the best 'fuid'virtual visit I have seen in recent months. Gaussian Splatting algorythm seems to be the 'game changer' thing in VR we were waiting for.... This is fantastic times in this area. what a time to be alive !
I really wish these projects, usually financed partially by European grants and other such schemes (aka tax payers), would release the raw data and let people develop their own experience with it.
Open data from museums are the only way I can see it being archived for the long term benefit of society.
PS: why the downvotes? It's literally written at the end but there's no download link anywhere...
> Funded with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRPP), Spain’s Next Generation EU financing and according to the initiatives within the component C.24.I3 Digitization and valorization of major cultural services, included in Prado Training as an Inclusive experience of visit.
I LOVE this
I would pay for being able to rent to audioguide for a couple of days (similarly to how you can rent the audioguide during the in person visit)
Cool, but it could be better if some of the paintings didn't have so much light reflected from the roof, like in room 12. Maybe the camera should have been higher?
I wonder what camera sensor was used to produce this. A DSLR on a pano/360 rig? Or something purpose built like a Weiss AG Civetta 230MP 360 scanning camera.
They also have x-rays of the individual works. Those seem to have been done in a separate process from the visible photos. Click on the camera icon next to a piece and there is then an additional selection for x-ray view.
I was in this museum a few weeks ago. I spent three hours there before I realized I hadn’t even covered half of it. It’s huge. Highly recommend a trip.
