Royal Palace, Madrid

On Christmas Eve 1734 a fire broke out in the old Alcázar of Madrid, the fortress-palace where Spain’s Habsburg kings had ruled an empire, and by the time it burned out three days later more than five hundred paintings from the royal collection had been lost. What rose on the same ridge above the Manzanares was a statement of a new dynasty: a Bourbon palace of granite and white limestone, vaulted throughout so that it could never burn the same way. A visit to the Royal Palace in Madrid today is a walk through that statement, from the marble staircase to a Throne Room under a ceiling by Giambattista Tiepolo. On our Small Group Tour of Spain & Portugal, a local guide takes the group inside on the first full day in the capital.

From Moorish fortress to Habsburg Alcázar

The site is far older than the palace. According to Patrimonio Nacional, which manages Spain’s royal sites, the Umayyad emir Muhammad I of Córdoba built a fortress here between about 860 and 880, above a settlement then called Majrit. It passed to Castile after the Christian capture of Toledo in 1085, and when Philip II settled the court in Madrid in 1561 the Alcázar became the seat of the Spanish Habsburgs, its rooms filling with the paintings of the royal collection.

Velázquez worked inside those rooms. Las Meninas is set in the Alcázar, and it was one of the canvases rescued from the 1734 fire. It now hangs a short walk away in the museum that grew out of the same royal collection, which our guide to the Prado Museum and how to pace a visit covers in detail.

Juvarra, Sacchetti and a palace built for eternity

Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV and the first Bourbon king of Spain, wanted a palace that announced the stability of his new dynasty. In 1735 he commissioned the Sicilian architect Filippo Juvarra, whose first scheme was enormous: Patrimonio Nacional describes a palace four times the size of the present one, with 23 courtyards and a façade 480 metres long. Juvarra died in 1736, and his pupil Giovanni Battista Sacchetti fitted the design onto the steeply sloping site of the Alcázar, where the building drops to as many as eight storeys.

The lesson of the fire was built into the structure. The palace is vaulted throughout, with timber used in its doors and windows and almost nowhere else, and the inscription on its foundation stone declares that it was raised for eternity. Construction ran from 1738 to 1764, and Charles III became the first king to live in it. Patrimonio Nacional gives the finished building more than 135,000 square metres and 3,418 rooms. Its exterior pairs a grey granite base with white limestone above, giant columns rising through the main storeys and, on the south side, a great clock designed by Francesco Sabatini that carries a bell from the old Alcázar.

Inside the Royal Palace, Madrid: the staircase and state rooms

Visitors enter through the great carriage doors on the south side and arrive at the foot of the main staircase. Sacchetti had planned twin stairs, one for the king and one for the queen, but Charles III preferred a single open staircase modelled on his palace in Naples. Its 72 broad, shallow steps are each cut from a single piece of marble 4.5 metres wide. Two marble lions by Felipe de Castro and Robert Michel guard the first landing, and Corrado Giaquinto painted the vault above with Religion Protected by Spain.

At the top, the Hall of Halberdiers, once the guard room, has a ceiling by Tiepolo, and the Hall of Columns stands where the second staircase was meant to go. Beyond lie the apartments of Charles III, including the Rococo room named after its designer, Mattia Gasparini, and the Gala Dining Room, which seats more than 140 guests and is still used for state banquets.

How much walking and climbing does the palace involve?

Expect to be on your feet throughout, climbing one long staircase and walking a sequence of large rooms on the main floor. The 72 marble steps are low and wide, built for ceremonial ascent, but there are a lot of them. On this tour the palace is part of a full guided day in Madrid, and the tour is graded Level 2 – Moderate: 3-5 hours of physical activity per day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground, and travellers need to be able to climb and descend stairs and carry their own luggage.

The Throne Room and Tiepolo’s ceiling

The Throne Room was the most important room in the king’s apartments, where audiences were received and where the body of a dead king lay in state before burial in the royal pantheon at El Escorial. It keeps the scheme Charles III devised for it in 1772: embroidered Genoese velvet on the walls, furniture made in Naples, and great mirrors from the royal glassworks at La Granja. Charles III also brought in lions from the Hall of Mirrors of the old Alcázar and bronzes that Velázquez had bought in Italy for Philip IV.

Look up. Giambattista Tiepolo, the Venetian master of the painted ceiling, covered the vault with an allegory of the Spanish monarchy, attended by Minerva and Apollo and surrounded by allegories such as Glory and Magnanimity and the gods of Olympus. Tiepolo spent his last years in Madrid, and his ceilings here are among the final great works of his career.

Stradivari and the crown

In the rooms leading to the Crown Room, glass cases hold the Palatine Quartet, also called the Decorated Quartet: two violins, a viola and a cello by Antonio Stradivari, inlaid with ivory and ebony paste. Patrimonio Nacional records that Charles III acquired the instruments in 1775 for his son, the future Charles IV, that a viola from the original set disappeared during the Peninsular War, and that the surviving instruments are still played in chamber concerts. Next door, the Crown Room holds the crown and sceptre; the gilded silver crown of Charles III was made to be displayed on a cushion at ceremonies, not worn.

The Royal Armoury and the Royal Pharmacy

Off the Plaza de la Armería stands the Royal Armoury, one of the most important collections of its kind. Its core is the armour of Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II, made in the leading workshops of southern Germany, northern Italy and Flanders for tournaments, parades and the hunt. After a fire in 1884 destroyed Philip II’s original armoury building, the present museum was built, lit by a long skylight that shows the etched and gilded steel at its finest.

The Royal Pharmacy, founded by Philip II in 1594 to supply medicines to the royal household, is also part of the palace complex. Check the official site to see which parts of the palace are open on the day you visit.

Are all the rooms open on the day of a visit?

Not always. The Royal Palace is still a working building of state, and it can close in whole or in part for official receptions and ceremonies, sometimes at short notice. The rooms on the visitor route also change from time to time. Opening times, closures and the current route are published on the official Patrimonio Nacional site, which is the place to check before you go.

Does the King of Spain live in the Royal Palace?

No. The royal family lives at the Palace of La Zarzuela, on the north-western edge of Madrid, and the Royal Palace is used for state occasions: official receptions, gala dinners, chamber concerts and military ceremonies. The last king to live here was Alfonso XIII, who left Spain in 1931 when the Second Republic was proclaimed, and the last official resident was Manuel Azaña, President of the Republic.

Plaza de Oriente, the Almudena and the palace gardens

The palace sits in a royal quarter worth walking around. On its east side the Plaza de Oriente links the palace to the Teatro Real. To the south, across the Plaza de la Armería, stands the Almudena Cathedral, begun in the 1880s and consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1993. Beside it, the Gallery of the Royal Collections opened in 2023 to show treasures from the royal collections.

On the north side, the formal Sabatini Gardens were begun in 1933 and opened to the public by Juan Carlos I in 1978. Below the west façade, the Campo del Moro slopes down towards the Manzanares. Its name recalls the Almoravid leader Ali ibn Yusuf, who is said to have camped here in 1109. From the foot of its long lawn you see what Sacchetti was dealing with: the palace high on its ridge above a granite base several storeys deep.

How the palace fits our days in Madrid

Madrid is the base for four nights, Days 7 to 10 of the tour, and the palace sits at the heart of the first full day. On Day 8 a local guide leads a full day through Madrid’s main sights and the history behind them, with entrance to the Royal Palace and to the Museo Reina Sofía, whose twentieth-century collection we cover in our guide to the Reina Sofía and Picasso’s Guernica. That evening a local guide leads a tapas tour across a series of bars, ending with a post-dinner walk to the Mercado San Miguel.

Day 9 is a walking tour of Toledo, the old imperial capital, described in our Toledo day trip from Madrid. Day 10 begins at the Prado with a local guide, with the rest of the day free, perhaps for the palace gardens or the Royal Armoury. On Day 11 the group leaves for Salamanca by way of the Royal Monastery at El Escorial, Philip II’s austere palace-monastery and a telling contrast with the Bourbon splendour of Madrid. Our day-by-day Spain and Portugal itinerary sets these four days within the full 24-day route from Barcelona to Granada.

The tour travels in a small group of up to 16 travellers, with a local guide on each of the three full days in Madrid. The full itinerary is on the Spain and Portugal tour page.

The Royal Palace rewards a little preparation. Know that the ashes of the Habsburg Alcázar lie beneath it and that its staircase was built for kings to climb slowly, and the building stops being a parade of gilded rooms and becomes a story of how Spain chose to present itself to the world. We look forward to climbing that marble staircase with you.