'Ideal for the cultured tourist . . . a vivid portrait' Times Literary Supplement

The charm of Madrid is elusive, but for those who know how to find it, the city has magic. Its magic can be found in the shadow cast over the present by the past. In this traveller's reader, a city that was once the seat of power for perhaps the most ambitious political enterprise the Western world had seen since the fall of Rome, the Spanish Empire, is brought to life with the help of rich and revealing eyewitness accounts from many different sources.

The Earl of Clarendon describes seventeenth-century bullfights; Salvador Dali plays a surrealist joke on a snooty barman at the Ritz; Rubens visits the Alcázar; Manet is at the Prado; generals and anarchists meet in the Puerta del Sol.

Hugh Thomas has chosen these and other eyewitness accounts from five hundred years of the Spanish capital's history, drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs and novels, to evoke for today's visitor and armchair travellers alike the dramatic events and personalities of the city's past.