Time Out Madrid (Time Out Guides)

If you are going to Madrid there are two books minimum you must read before hand and take with you: Eyewitness Guide Madrid, and this Time Out Guide. I have been to Madrid several times and always take the most current version of the Time Out with me.
To understand why the books are so good, you need to know that Madrid has the greatest number of bars and restaurants per capita of any city in the world. In Spain, the people of Madrid are given the nickname gatos, which means cats, because they stay up all night. They go to work at 8am, leave at noon, go home and sleep after the big meal of the day, return to work at 5pm, work until 9, leave work and go to tapas bars, where they have one drink and a snack, move to the next. Keep moving until around 11pm, when they stop for dinner, then it is off to a disco club, flamenco club, or a bar. But the same m.o.: in for a half hour or hour, then move on again. At 4:30 am on the weekends there are traffic jams because the streets are so...Read more

After living in Madrid for six months, I can honestly say this is the best guide that we found for recommendations on local bars, cafes, restaurants, shopping, nightlife, and tourist attractions. For people with a limited amount of time in the city it might be best to go with a tourism-focused guide like Rick Steves which gives you specific itinerary recommendations, but Time Out would still be a good secondary guide for those folks. It contains extensive information on all of the usual and unusual tourist sights, including up-to-date pricing and hours, as well as an abundance of listings of bars, restaurants, and cafes that contain more locals than tourists (which I prefer). I know I'm sounding like an ad for Time Out, but this was the first time I'd used one of their guides and I was impressed. It ended up being the one we turned to again and again, when we needed a recommendation but wanted something that would feel truly "Spanish" (and not created for tourists). We also found...Read more

This is the best guide in English to Madrid. Written by residents (and it shows in all sorts of ways), its recommendations for restaurants, hotels, bars and cafés, culture, and entertainment are invariably on the mark. Trust me: I was a resident for 6 years and many of its finds are unknown even to life-long citizens. It's also almost entirely free of the sloppy, tired, and sad travel-book clichés about Madrid (tendentious comparisons with other European capitals, with Barcelona, etc.) that still too often bedevil journalistic writing about the city (fortunately, now beginning to change as writers learn to trade their arrogant ignorance for a little knowledge), written as a rule by outsiders with 3 days in the city and too much prejudiced baggage to understand what they're seeing or know what to look for. The city is fabulous and this guide is a superb companion to its fabulousness.