This first floor apartment is in a quiet residential neighbourhood in Madrid. It is more spacious than it looks in the photographs, and is filled with dozens of interesting looking books in Spanish and French, ranging from Tintin cartoons to books on philosophy, cooking, and anthropology. The apartment and the surrounding area feels safe and secure and is about twelve minutes easy walk from the nearest Metro station at Arturo Sofia. It is just over half an hour to the airport on the excellent Metro system, and about 30 to 45 minutes (including time for walking to and from the Metro) to the more touristy areas around the city centre. The location suited us as we needed to go to the IFEMA conference centre on certain days. There is a grocery store about 2 minutes walk from the apartment, and a couple of bakeries, Burger King, VIPS restaurant (we did not try these) and a few other stores/ bars about 5 minutes walk. For more interesting local and international food we felt it was better to travel nearer the centre, although there was an excellent Indian-Nepalese restaurant (Everest Tandoori) less than 15 minutes walk from the apartment which we tried on our last night. We arrived during an unexpected early summer heatwave, with temperatures up to 40 degrees C, so if we could have changed one thing about the apartment it would be to install air conditioning! There is a lovely little open air swimming pool which is shared by the residents of the apartment blocks- we found it a nice way to cool down- you can see the pool area from one of the apartment windows and pick a quiet time to use it.
Tomás was a very helpful host, who made us feel most welcome when we arrived. It was useful to know that he lives in the same apartment block in case of emergencies (there were none).