Retiro Park self-guided walk: 8 stops, from the Puerta de Alcalá to the Ángel Caído

Madrid has a park that used to belong to kings, and you can walk it in a morning. The Retiro Park was the private retreat of the Spanish court from the 1630s until 1868, when a revolution sent Queen Isabella II into exile and the gates swung open to everyone. What’s left is 350 acres of statues, gardens, a glass palace, a lake with rowboats, and one fountain where the devil himself is falling. This route covers 8 stops in a loop of about 3.6 km, starting outside the park at the Puerta de Alcalá. It’s flat and shaded the whole way, and the audio at the first stop is free in eight languages.

Stop 1: the Puerta de Alcalá

Start at the grand arch on the Plaza de la Independencia, before you even enter the park. The Puerta de Alcalá is a neoclassical gate of granite and white Colmenar stone, and it has a quiet joke built into it: it guards nothing. The traffic doesn’t pass through its three arches; the road swerves around the monument entirely. King Charles III commissioned it in the 1770s from the Italian architect Francesco Sabatini as a new entrance in the city wall, on the road east to Alcalá de Henares, which is where the name comes from. Inaugurated in 1778, the gate long outlasted the walls around it.

Audio at this stop is free in eight languages. Open the Puerta de Alcalá stop →

Cross the street and enter the park through the Puerta de la Independencia gates.

Stop 2: the Paseo de la Argentina

The main avenue inside the gate is lined with stone kings and queens, which is why locals call it the Paseo de las Estatuas, the Walk of the Statues. Here’s the detail worth knowing: the statues were never made for this spot. They were sculpted between 1750 and 1753 for the cornice of the Royal Palace, part of a grand plan for 114 royal figures that was never finished. They sat in storage for nearly a century before being moved here in 1842. For a long time the row came up one short, until the city finally filled the gap with a statue of Queen Juana of Castile, better known by her unfair nickname, Juana la Loca.

Stop 3: the Estanque Grande

Follow the path and the trees open onto the lake, the oldest part of the park. The Estanque Grande was dug between 1634 and 1635 for royal pageants, including mock naval battles staged for the court. Today the spectacle is smaller and more democratic: rowing boats circling the water, with the semicircular colonnade of the Monument to Alfonso XII across it. The monument took some twenty years to build, was financed by public subscription, and was inaugurated in 1922, nearly forty years after the king died of tuberculosis at 27. Look for the bronze mermaids at the base. It’s a strange detail for a royal memorial, and a very Madrid one.

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Stop 4: the Palacio de Cristal

Walk south from the lake and you reach the most photogenic building in the park. The Crystal Palace went up in 1887 for the Philippines Exposition, a colonial exhibition of plants, products and, uncomfortably, indigenous Filipino people displayed in a mock village, part of the story Madrid doesn’t hide. The architect Ricardo Velázquez Bosco built it of iron and glass in a matter of months, inspired by the London original. Today it belongs to the Reina Sofía museum and hosts free temporary art exhibitions, but the building itself is still the main show, mirrored in the duck pond in front of it.

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Stop 5: the Rosaleda

A few minutes further south, at the park’s tip, is the Rosaleda, the rose garden: a sunken circle laid out in 1915 by the gardener Cecilio Rodríguez, modelled on the Bagatelle garden in Paris. More than 4,000 roses grow here, and in May or June the peak and the perfume alone justify the detour. Out of season it’s a quiet, green circle, and a good place to sit down for a while rather than rush through; locals treat this park as their living room, and it’s worth doing the same.

Stop 6: the Fuente del Ángel Caído

Retrace your steps a little and find the roundabout fountain that gives the park its strangest corner. The Fuente del Ángel Caído is a fallen Lucifer, writhing in bronze, wings failing, serpents around him. The sculptor Ricardo Bellver modelled the figure in Rome in 1877, aged 32, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost; it won first prize at the national fine arts exhibition that year and was cast in bronze and placed here in 1885. It is one of the very few public monuments to the devil anywhere in the world. The legend says the fountain sits exactly 666 metres above sea level. The real altitude is closer to 667, which makes the story a coincidence rather than a conspiracy, but nobody in Madrid is in a hurry to give it up.

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Stop 7: the Parterre Garden

Loop back toward the western edge and the mood changes completely. The Parterre is a formal French garden, begun in 1716 under Philip V, a French-born king who wanted a taste of the formal gardens of his homeland. Low clipped hedges, symmetrical paths, cypress trees. One of those cypresses is the survivor here: a Montezuma cypress planted around 1633, which makes it nearly four hundred years old. Legend says Napoleon’s troops hung their cannons from its branches when they fortified the park during the Peninsular War. The tree outlasted them.

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Stop 8: the Casón del Buen Retiro

Leave the park through the Puerta de Felipe IV and you meet the last piece of the original royal palace. The Casón del Buen Retiro was built as a ballroom for the Buen Retiro palace, and it is one of only two buildings that survived Napoleon’s occupation, when most of the palace complex was destroyed for a military citadel. Its oddest chapter came late: from 1981 to 1992 it housed Picasso’s Guernica, which had returned to Spain after four decades in exile in New York, before the painting moved to its purpose-built home at the Reina Sofía. Since a restoration finished in 2007, the Casón has been the Prado’s study centre and library. From here you’re a short walk from the Prado itself, if the day still has legs.

Know before you go

The route is about 3.6 km and takes around 90 minutes at a relaxed pace; a boat ride and a proper stop at the Rosaleda can turn it into an afternoon. Come early if you can: the park opens around 6 a.m. and the first hour is the quietest. Metro line 2 stops at Retiro, right by the Puerta de Alcalá. The walk is flat throughout, benches are everywhere, and there are kiosks for coffee and churros, though a picnic from a market beats anything sold inside the park.

The audio narration for all 8 stops is the Retiro Park Stroll walk on Redd Walks: GPS-triggered stops in eight languages, including Hindi and Tamil, so the story of each statue plays as you arrive. The Puerta de Alcalá stop is free to try before you decide; the rest unlock with a single day pass that covers every Madrid tour.

Open the Retiro Park Stroll →