Palacio de Velázquez

The building of red and yellow brick in front of you went up between 1881 and 1883 for the National Mining Exhibition. Ricardo Velázquez Bosco designed it, with bands of coloured ceramic by Daniel Zuloaga and a roof made largely of glass, so no lamps were needed inside.

That it still stands here is less obvious than it seems, because exhibition pavilions were normally demolished once the event was over. This one stayed, and today it serves as a gallery of the Reina Sofía, Spain's national museum of modern art. Four years later the same architect was asked to build a second pavilion a few hundred metres away, and that one is still standing too.

We follow the path south, until a building of glass appears among the trees beside a small pond.