Madrid

The Swashbuckling city of Madrid celebrates itself and life around the clock. After spending most of the 20th century sequestered at the center of a totalitarian regime, Madrid has burst back onto the world stage with an energy redolent of its 16th-century golden age, when playwrights and painters visited the flame of Spain's brilliant royal court. A vibrant crossroads for Iberia and the world's Hispanic peoples and cultures, the Spanish capital has an infectious appetite for art, music, and epicurean pleasure.

After the first gulp of icy mountain air, the next thing likely to strike you is the vast, cerulean, cumulus-clouded sky immortalized in the paintings of Velázquez. "De Madrid al cielo" ("from Madrid to heaven") goes the saying, and the heavens seem just overhead at the center of the 2,120-ft-high Castilian plateau. "High, wide, and handsome" might aptly describe this sprawling conglomeration of ancient red-tile rooftops punctuated by redbrick Mudéjar churches and gray-slate roofs and spires left by the 16th-century Habsburg monarchs who made Madrid the capital of Spain in 1561.

Then there are the paintings, the artistic legacy of one of the greatest global empires ever assembled. King Carlos I (1500-58), who later became emperor Carlos V, inherited most of Europe between 1516-1519, and amassed art from all corners of his empire -- which is how the early masters of the Flemish, Dutch, Italian, French, German, and Spanish schools found their way to Spain's palaces. Among the Prado Museum, the contemporary Reina Sofía museum, the eclectic yet comprehensive Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, and Madrid's smaller artistic repositories -- the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the Convento de las Descalzas Reales, and still others -- there are more paintings in Madrid than anyone can reasonably hope to contemplate in a lifetime.

Modern-day Madrid spreads eastward into the 19th-century grid of the Barrio de Salamanca and sprawls northward through the neighborhoods of Chamberí and Chamartín. But the Madrid to explore carefully on foot is right in the center: the oldest one, between the Royal Palace and Madrid's midtown forest, the Parque del Buen Retiro. These neighborhoods will introduce you to the city's finest resources -- its people and their electricity, whether at play in bars or at work in finance or the media and film industries.

As the highest capital in Europe, Madrid is hot in summer and freezing in winter, with temperate springs and autumns. Especially in winter -- when steamy café windows beckon you inside for a hot caldo (broth) and the blue skies are particularly bright -- Madrid is the next best place to heaven.