As I mentioned, lots of parks here as well as squares or plazas and almost all cities have a Plaza de Espana. All the parks and plazas have, usually, a large monument, or an interesting piece of artwork/sculpture, or they may just have a plaque commemorating something. The monuments are often tall columns with soldiers or horses or both; generals with swords, guys with cannons, you get the picture. Historical stuff. The Spanish love their monuments.
We’ve run into some not so usual things though in these parks and plazas. Not the ‘Worst Tours’ type of stuff but more just oddball or whimsical. For instance, just north of the royal palace in a nice park is an actual Egyptian temple, the temple of Debod, a 2nd century BC structure dedicated to the goddess Isis and one of the very few Egyptian works located outside of Egypt.
On the other side of the city in the El Retiro Park, is a man-made lake, a crystal palace, and the fountain of the fallen angel, the only acknowledged public monument to the Devil. The sculptor, Ricardo Bellver, was inspired by a line in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
In between Debod temple and the devil fountain is a really weird sculpture of another fallen angel. This one is hard to spot and while Bellvers Fallen Angel represents Lucifer, this piece entitled ‘Air Crash’ is just an angel who has done a face-plant into the top of a 5-story building. Most locals are not even aware it is there. Some popular theories include that it represents Led Zeppelin’s swan song angel. I’m not making this stuff up.
Just a short distance from this oddity is a small square at the end of Calle de La Luna, the Plaza de la Luna in which sits a plaque or marker honoring a portal/gateway to….I’m not even going to attempt to describe this. Here is a quote from the Atlas Obscura on this:
The installation of this marker represented the first time the Kcymaerxthaere project has been able to honor a gateway to the Umbrasphaere–the connection between all the shadows and darkness on the planet. Indeed, the darkest part of one shadow is always related to the darkest part of the next. It also is a wonderful reminder of the way Nobunaga-Ventreven himself was such a connector of disparate parts of Kcymaerxthaere, his commitment to the richness of the world was, in some ways, unparalleled.
You can see the picture below. I am not making this stuff up.
Back to more normal stuff, a little south of the weirdness is a restaurant we stumbled onto called Sobrino de Botin. Recognized by Guinness as the world’s oldest restaurant still in operation having opened in 1725. Apparently, it gets a mention in Hemmingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and the artist Goya supposedly worked there as a lad. Cool stuff abounds, and you won’t find it unless you go walkabout.
We also spotted a garden growing up the side of a 4-story building. Like, a real garden. Tending to it is probably a real bitch.
We did a little research after finding some of these oddities and found that there are a few more stranger things here, but they are not on the beaten path and a little out of the way. Like the giant Olmec head (as in an Olmec statue from Central America) that sits atop a pyramid in the middle of a traffic circle somewhere in the south part of the city. Or the statue of the ‘Rocker Grandma’ dedicated to Ángeles Rodríguez Hidalgo who at the age of 70, decided to get into the heavy metal rock scene in the 80’s. She became such an icon that she had her own column in the Heavy Rock magazine and was the cover on one of Panzer’s (heavy metal band) albums. I am not making this stuff up.
Madrid…we hardly know you!
