Visiting the Prado had been Dad’s primary reason for wanting to visit Spain in the first place. Imagine the dismay when after arriving in Madrid we read that queues to buy tickets would stretch round the building and that you really needed to book a couple of weeks in advance. We decided to go and have a look anyway with a contingency plan to visit another gallery if access would take too long.
In the event, the queue was really short and we only had to wait a couple of minutes to buy our tickets.
The gallery is vast and despite staying for most of the day we only managed to see perhaps 25% of it. Mum is a big fan of Hieronymus Bosch and since the Prado has the world’s best collection of his works she made a bee-line for that room. Dad decided that since he was in Spain he should concentrate on Spanish artists so he spent a long time looking at Velázquez and Goya whilst Sophia followed a suggested route to see a collection of the gallery’s highlights.
We had lunch in the gallery cafe which turned out to be quite tasty and not too expensive.
Unfortunately, the Prado doesn’t allow photography and whilst many people seemed to be managing to take surreptitious photos with their phones, Dad felt that his DSLR would certainly attract too much attention.