5 de julio, 2025
Dear. friends, known and yet to be known.
Midmorning, it is already hot. Today I miss the cool morning temperatures of Utah. However, nostalgia aside, Alicante is pleasant.
This week saw me in Madrid for two days where it is higher, drier, and hotter.
The AVE (high velocity) train between here and the capital is a marvel as is watching the countryside change. We climbed out of the almost absurdly dry coastal plains and hills—with no green except where there was an exotic water source—up to the central plains, the meseta or altiplano, the roaming ground of the strategically deluded Don Quijote, before seeing greener valleys open and buildings rise as we dropped slightly into Madrid, an almost megacity.
Truthfully, I am not sure who is more deluded, the inestimable and idealistic Spanish nobleman wannabe, or us. He saw beauty and sweetness in rough women, Dulcinea; perfectibility in his nag, Rosinantes, and all kinds of ghosts, castles and enemies in the fat-based windmills of this very breezy plateau. All of this is similar to the fantasy offering of Madrid’s Gran Via, its shopping golden miles(s), from tawdry to glittering—anyone with money can appear noble.
Compared with the coastal cities of Valencia or Barcelona, Madrid is not really all that old, yet is has aged, showing centuries of glory, fading dreams, and dwellings of ordinary people (poor and otherwise). Still, its streets and avenues hold out charm—sidewalk cafes under sycamores (plane trees here), buildings from earlier centuries mostly eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth that hold an authenticity and beauty seemingly lacking in the concrete and glass late century.
Nonetheless, the almost-psychedelic towers near the torturous Chamartin Train stations promise a future of the over-drugged Elon Musk who is horribly uncomfortable in the contemporary world. At least one reminds of an idealized interplanetary space ship ready to blast off to mars, with toreadors and Quijotes on board.
However, nothing can beat stretching out on the grass in Madrid’s El Retiro Park, or on benches in the more formal Royal Botanical gardens next door, or perhaps exhausted from art over a coffee or cold water in the Prado museum, also next door. Or you can escape them and lose yourself in a descending pedestrian street of book vendors, one after another. You can also cross over to an older neighborhood by the other mega museum of contemporary Art, the Reina Sofia where Picasso’s Guernica has its home. Very close, on a narrow street going up a hill, you can avoid the masses of gawking tourists before Picasso, in a thoughtful and resistant feminist and LBGTQI bookstore, rainbows everywhere.
Behind the also mega museum, the Thyssen Bornemisza, (across the street from the Prado) with its stupendous collection of renaissance and late renaissance art, as well as a significant holding of contemporary works, I found a charming little place, trumpeting Peru.
Its name QoriTika, means golden flower in Quechua, although the servers seemed to be far removed from knowledge about Peru and its food. Still, it was a refuge, a Retiro with chilled and clovy chicha morada, salted canchitas, and a menu of creole dishes.
Madrid overwhelms with its richness of offerings and, after two days, I was glad to face long lines and confusion to board the late train in Chamartin back to the coast.
Yours, a truly sad American the day after what should have been a day of celebration of ideals.
David
