Recreation in Madrid

Madrid is famous for its numerous sidewalk cafés and café-bars.

Madrileños often walk along the avenues in the evenings when the city's many fountains are illuminated, although this activity has declined as many boulevards have become more crowded with automobiles.

There are several large parks within the city.

The most important is Retiro Park, which is much like New York City’s Central Park. It features many tree-lined avenues, an art exhibition pavilion, an artificially created lake, monuments, fountains, and a rose garden.

A second large park is the Casa de Campo, which has a cable railway, monorail, and a modern zoo.

Another park, the Parque del Oeste, has a broad area of trees, rose gardens, and walks between the city and the Manzanares River.

Madrid has a growing variety of fitness centers and sports clubs with golf courses and tennis courts.

Spaniards, like most Europeans, are fans of soccer, and Madrid has two huge soccer stadiums, each holding as many as 100,000 people.

The city also has a large horseracing track and several large public swimming pools.

In the winter madrileños can ski in the nearby mountain ranges, the Sierra de Guadarrama and the Sierra de Gredos.

In the summer many people leave the city to escape the heat and spend weekends in the mountains.

As prosperity increases in Madrid, it is becoming more common for people to build summer homes in the valleys of the two mountain ranges.