Midnight In Madrid

There can be no question about it:

Midnight in Madrid – Magnifique!

Some cities just are. When spotlights carve out individual buildings out of the darkness, leaving others in a haze of indirect light and shadows, we, the observers, lose some things (context, a certain degree of detail) and win others: mainly scale.

Some cities simply benefit more from this trade-off than others, and few do more so than Madrid.

It is not entirely coincidental that night pictures of surprisingly many of Madrid’s main sites – the Gran Via, the Puerta del Sol, the Plaza de Independencia – are top-rated on Google’s results page.

Here are some more of a selection of night pictures we’ve taken at midnight in Madrid:

We took these photographs as our way of spending midnight in Madrid.

A couple of weeks ago, we were staying in Madrid on the invitation of the leading budget Spanish airline Vueling and the award-winning Indie Internet radio station ScannerFM who had asked us to discover the city on our own terms. In the day time, we used the opportunity to search out a couple of easy hikes in and around the Spanish capital. Sponsored visitors are never off duty, of course, and in the evenings we continued our hikes in the city itself – from tapas bar to tapas bar, mainly. It’s a hard life! But at least we never forgot to take the camera.