Guided tour to Prado Museum and Royal Palace of Madrid – Avoid queues
Save money by doing both of these guided tours in a single day and avoid long entrance queues at the Prado Museum and the Royal Palace
Museo del Prado visit
With our 2-hour guided tour, get to know the most significant works of art at the Prado Museum, the most important museum in Spain and one of the most important in the world.
Avoid the long ticket lines and enjoy the museums accompanied by expert guides who will supply you with ample information about the main masterpieces in both museums.
Our excursion will begin with the visit to the Prado Museum. This gallery hosts 8,000 works from the 12th to 20th centuries, of which about 2,000 are on public display. As it is impossible to see all these works in a single day, during our tour we will get to know the most celebrated works from the 15th to 19th centuries. If you’d like to see other works, you can do so at any other time during the day once the tour is over, since the ticket will allow you to enter the museum throughout the day.
We will tour through the Prado in chronological order, seeing the oldest paintings first and ending with the most recent.
We will see the “primitive paintings” (between the gothic and renaissance periods), including The Annunciation by Fra Angélico and The Descent from the Cross by Rogier Van der Weyden.
We’ll contemplate two masterpieces by The Bosco, an unclassifiable Dutch artist halfway between gothic and renaissance: The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych and Table of the Seven Deadly Sins.
We will enjoy some paintings in the mannerism style of Doménikos Theotokópoulos, better known as El Greco, concentrating on two of his most relevant works: Saint Sebastian and The Adoration of the Shepherds.
We will appreciate the baroque realism of Diego Velázquez and his expertise in light with some of his most important paintings: The Feast of Bacchus, Vuncan’s Forge and Las meninas.
We will observe the masterpieces of Francisco de Goya, the great Spanish painter of the 18th century. Among his works, we’ll see The family of Carlos IV, The Naked Maja y The Clothed Maja, The 2nd of May in Madrid or “The Fight against the Mamelukes”, The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid or “The executions” and we will finish by visiting the room with Goya’s black paintings, where we will find his paintings The drowning Dog, Fight to Death with Clubs or Saturn.
Upon finishing our guided tour of the Prado Museum, you will have free time to enjoy this impressive gallery on your own and enjoy other works by painters and masters such as Titian, Rubens, Murillo, Rafael, Tintoretto or Zurbarán, among others.
The entry ticket is valid for the entire day, so you can return if you wish after taking a break and regaining strength to enjoy a magnificent day in what is considered one of the best museums in the world.
Guided visit to the Royal Palace
Discover on our guided visit to Royal Palace the immense heritage of this historic and extraordinary residence inhabited by the Spanish royal family until 1931. In addition, this tour allows you to avoid long queues at the entrance.
The Royal Palace was built over the course of two decades, from 1738 to 1759, which makes sense when you realize that we are talking about the largest Royal Palace in Western Europe, where there are more than 3,000 rooms, practically double the size of the Palace of Versailles or Buckingham Palace.
Our tour is centred on the grand protocol rooms, many of which are still used for official acts. On the other hand, the Palace is no longer used by the Spanish monarchs as a residence, which was the case for monarchs from Felipe V to Alfonso XIII.
Therefore, the Royal Palace has become one of the most luxurious that Spain has had in recent centuries. This will be apparent from the first moment of the tour, when we ascend the monumental marble and granite staircase, where the crest of the royal family and a statue of Carlos III bid us welcome.
Those stairs will take us to the second floor, where the great official rooms are located. We will visit some of the rooms, like the Hall of the Halberdier, the Porcelain Cabinet, the Hall of Mirrors or the Throne Room, where the king solemnly receives his guests. The furniture, decorations, tapestries, paintings and numerous clocks in all of the rooms will surprise you.
We will also visit the Royal Chapel, which is for the monarchs’ private use. It is a first-class work of architecture decorated with rococo and neoclassical paintings that ornament the walls and the large semi-circular cupola.
The Royal Chapel is the best finale we can think of for this guided visit through the Royal Palace of Madrid. However, we recommend visiting other places on your own, such as the impressive Armory, where some of the best collections of armaments from the 16th and 17th centuries are displayed.
Neither should you miss the opportunity to walk through the Gardens of Sabatini, located behind the Palace, where you will be able to walk among trees, floral gardens and spectacular fountains.
Finally, we also encourage you to take a walk through the Plaza de Oriente, where you can see the main facade of the palace, a great equestrian sculpture of King Felipe IV and statues of the old Spanish kings.
Plaza de Oriente is a good place to say goodbye to the solemn monument that is the Royal Palace, which, thanks to our visit, you are now much more familiar with.
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