Madrid's Secret Places

Built around 200 BC in Debod, near ancient Aswan, this sandstone temple was dismantled stone by stone and gifted to Spain by Egypt in 1968, in gratitude for Spanish help saving monuments threatened by the Aswan Dam. It was rebuilt exactly as it stood, in Madrid's Parque del Oeste.

Most visitors photograph it from a distance and move on, never realizing the porticoes, reflecting pool, and surrounding esplanade are freely open to walk right up to and around, at any hour, with nobody checking for a ticket.

At sunset, the temple's silhouette against the sky — and its reflection in the pool — draws a crowd of locals with a very different rhythm from the museum queues a few kilometers away: people bring a drink, sit on the grass, and watch the sky change color over the temple stones.

These seven mounded hills were built in 1985 over the site of a shantytown that had grown up in the 1920s, and today form one of Madrid's most distinctive parks — locally nicknamed 'Las Siete Tetas' for their rounded shape.

From the tallest mound, the view sweeps across the entire Madrid skyline, including the Cuatro Torres business district and, on clear days, the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains in the distance — a wide-open panorama with none of the crowding of the city's more famous viewpoints.

It's a genuinely local spot: families picnic, kids run down the grassy slopes, and photographers set up at sunset, but almost nobody arrives by tour bus.

In 1798, Goya painted the dome and walls of this small royal chapel with frescoes depicting a miracle of St. Anthony of Padua, using a radically loose, almost impressionistic technique decades ahead of its time — populated with ordinary Madrid townspeople rather than idealized saints.

To protect the paintings from the wear of regular worship, an identical twin chapel was built next door in 1929, and the original became a dedicated museum. Since 1919, Goya's own remains have rested here too — minus his skull, famously missing when his body was exhumed and reinterred.

Entry is free and a full visit takes about 30 minutes, but almost nobody outside dedicated Goya enthusiasts and Madrid locals makes the trip — even though the frescoes rank among his most important surviving work.