The art triangle on one line
The Prado, the Thyssen and the Reina Sofía all sit on the avenue or a few steps off it.
Martin Snopek from Prague (Czech Republic) — CC BY 2.0 · Javier Perez Montes — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Dani Logar — CC BY 2.0 · Américo Toledano — CC BY-SA 4.0
Both. It is the street you walk to reach the museums, but it is also the urban layout UNESCO listed together with the Retiro. Anyone interested in architecture and planning will read it as a sight; anyone here for the museums will read it as the route.
Start at Cibeles in the north and walk south: the Thyssen, then the Prado, then the Reina Sofía, ending at Atocha. Check each museum's free-entry window in advance, since they fall at different times and may change your order.
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A tree-lined avenue running between Plaza de Cibeles and Atocha, the oldest planned promenade in Madrid and the spine of what the city calls its art triangle. Along it or a few steps off it stand the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofía, together with the fountains and gardens laid out with it in the eighteenth century. The avenue and the neighbouring Retiro are inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage list as a single cultural landscape, on the stated grounds that this layout was an early model for the idea of an urban avenue given over to science, art and recreation, a pattern later repeated in other cities. In practice it is the best line on which to organise a day in Madrid: walk south from Cibeles and you pass the major museums in order, ending at Atocha with its station and indoor garden. It needs no ticket and no plan. The dense trees make it one of the better streets to walk in summer heat, and the cafés along it suit a pause between two museums.
The Prado, the Thyssen and the Reina Sofía all sit on the avenue or a few steps off it.
The dense trees make it one of the better streets to walk in summer, when shade becomes a practical matter.
South from Cibeles to Atocha takes you past the major museums in sequence with no need for the Metro.
Paseo del Prado, between Plaza de Cibeles and Plaza de Atocha, Madrid