Exploding with Happiness!: Madrid Museums, Part 2

Today started for Evan with another workout in the beautiful Parque Retiro. As we will head back to Barcelona tonight, we also had to pack our bags this morning.

Having bought our three museum combo tickets yesterday, and having been to only one of the three museums (the Sorolla museum was not on the combo ticket), our plans for today were pretty clear. We set out together first for the Reina Sofia museum, which is near the train station. To get there, we decided to take the scenic route through the royal botanical gardens on the Prado side of the street. The gardens were lush and beautiful. We enjoyed walking through them. They are quite formal, with symmetrical paths, plantings and fountains throughout. However, when we got to the far end, we realized that we were fenced in. The modest ticket price we paid to enter meant that entrances and exits were restricted. Guess we should have figured that out. We had to circle back to our point of entry, so our scenic route was more of a scenic detour, but it was very pleasant nonetheless.

We spent a couple hours touring the Reina Sofia collection, which contains quite extensive holdings of Picasso, Dali and Miro, among lots of other artists. By mid-afternoon, we needed a break and some sustenance, so we left the Reina Sofia and headed back toward our apartment. Along the way, we stopped for a delicious, efficient and completely different meal at a Thai restaurant.

After lunch, we continued on our way to the third of the combo ticket museums. Our weather in Madrid has been a bit iffy. We were surprised by showers on our first day, and the forecast the next two days was mixed, but with a good chance of rain (i.e., 100%) for today. However, it wasn’t raining and the afternoon was actually very pleasant, so we thought we would work in a brief visit to the Parque Retiro along the way so that Sara and I could see it. The park is beautiful. It was originally built by the Spanish royalty for their own use, but was later converted to a public park. It is huge, diverse and very well-maintained. We didn’t cover much of it, but saw the lake and rowboats as well as some beautiful gardens and paths.

Our final museum was the Thyssen-Bornemiszma Museum, which is even closer to our apartment. It was the private collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemiszma (not too sure who he was, but he had a great art collection) and was established as a museum open to the public in 1992. The building also holds the still-private art collection of his wife, Carmen, so in fact the museum is two collections. These collections span about 900 years of art. Most of it is paintings, and much of it is European. However, while more limited than the Prado collection (it might have one or two paintings by a particular artist), it is more diverse. Of the three museums, I think it was my favorite.

When the Thyssen Museum closed at 7:00, we returned to our apartment to stretch out for a few minutes and rest our weary feet before taking our suitcases to the train station. Once there, we had time to search out the turtles we had heard about. In the middle of the cavernous main area of the station there is a sort of rain forest with a pond at one end in which there are hundreds of turtles. Different.

As I write this, we are on the train back to Barcelona. It’s nice to be sitting.