Like Barcelona, Madrid has undergone a great rebirth in the last 20 years.

Madrid is a monumental capital city with wide boulevards and tulip-bordered promenades. It is a city of lovely plazas, parks and gardens filled with sculpture and flowing fountains. It is royal city of enormous palaces and old world hotels.

Yet, more than anything, Madrid is a city of museums. It has one of Europe’s greatest collections of art housed in a truly unequalled series of excellent museums.

Lovers of art flock from all over the world to see El Prado, an enormous museum overflowing with masterpieces not only by Velazquez and Goya, but also Bosch, Rubens, Titian and other giants of European art through the 19th century.

Cognoscenti of modern art flock in equally large numbers to see one piece of art alone: Picasso’s near-iconic Guernica. Stridently anti-Fascist and commemorating a massacre in the Spanish Civil War, Picasso would not allow his masterpiece to be returned to Spain until after Franco’s death. Housed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, it was finally returned to Spain in 1981.

Recent years have seen the construction of the new Reina Sophia (Queen Sophia) Museum give Guernica a proper home. This museum also contains an outstanding collection of modern art.

The third of the great museums of Madrid houses the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection: one of the world’s finest private collections of art that was recently sold to the Spanish government.

There are additionally a number of lesser-known museums. When you get tired of museums, there are plenty of churches, palaces and other sites in this history-laden city. Not to mention restaurants, tapas bars, cafés, stores and two of the finest hotels in Europe.