are quartered in the Hotel Suecia where the Hemingways took a suite on his last visit to Spain thirty-six years later. The hotel does not seem to know, or care, that he stayed here, which is quite refreshing in a way, if a little odd, as the cultural centre next door is running an exhibition called ‘Hemingway y Espana’, consisting mainly of photographs of Ernest on that trip in 1959.
The pictures are quite sad. His powerful build is much reduced and the white beard and wispy white hair make him look more like some venerable old prophet than a man only just out of his fifties.
A first visitor to Madrid could do worse than follow the Hemingway trail, not just because so much of it still exists, but because he was a man of taste and did not waste his time on the second-rate.
Across the road from the hotel is the Prado, one of the world’s greatest collection of paintings, where Hemingway caught up with his beloved Bruegels and Goyas and where I could spend an entire visit in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s
Garden Of Earthly Delights
.
Then follow him, for refreshment, into the old quarter west of the Prado, where the narrow streets bear the names of writers like Cervantes and Lope de Vega and take a beer at the Cerveceria Alemana, a 96-year-old bierkeller with Spanish tiling and an open unfussy interior, which was one of Hemingway’s favourites. (If you feel oppressed by the presence of the Great Man, I recommend La Venencia just round the corner in the Calle Echegaray, of which there is no record of him ever entering. The speciality is sherry served from the cask and the peeling walls are stained a rich tobacco brown.)
Hemingway would likely have repaired at this point for a cocktail in the Art Deco elegance of Chicote on the Gran Via, a cocktail bar founded in 1931 ‘to promote talk and opinion’. Chicote earned Hemingway’s undying loyalty by never closing throughout the bombardments of the Spanish Civil War. There’s another photo of him here, from 1959, frail and bearded.
Though you may be hungry by now, remember that Spanish restaurants don’t expect you for dinner until well after nine. Hemingway fans will take his recommendation and head straight for Casa Botin, which has been serving meals for over 200 years and whose wood-fired ovens turn out herds of roast suckling pig every night. It’s easy to find. Down the steps at the south-west corner of the Plaza Mayor, into Calle Cuchilleros (Knife-maker Street) and it’s practically next door to a restaurant with a large sign, ‘Hemingway Never Ate Here’.
As it is inconceivable that anyone but an invalid should be in bed in Madrid before one-thirty, I’m easily tempted into a post-prandial night-cap. We head for the focal point of the old city, the wide cobbled expanse of the seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor with, at its centre, a fine statue of Philip III on a charger. The Plaza is grand, but car-free and friendly and full of bars which make it almost impossible to cross without feeling thirsty.
Bar Andalu, like Botin, is traditional, but ‘traditional’ in Spain is not so much of a tourist board cliche as it is elsewhere, and generally means something still very close to the spirit of the country.
Three great bulls’ heads loom out of the wall surrounded by an exhaustive collection of framed photographs showing matadors in moments of cape-swirling glory or gory and gruesome injury.
Machismo drips from its tiled and trophied walls, and it is perhaps no coincidence that, as I eventually leave to totter home, I notice for the first time the truly heroic proportions of the testicles on Philip III’s horse.
H emingway, Spain and bullfighting are inseparable. After his visit in 1923 in which he wanted to live where the bullfighters lived, he was, as you might say, hooked.
He returned year after year. The bullfighter first appears in his books in
The Sun Also Rises
and, a few years later, in an exhaustive
aficionado’s
guide called
Death in the
The pictures are quite sad. His powerful build is much reduced and the white beard and wispy white hair make him look more like some venerable old prophet than a man only just out of his fifties.
A first visitor to Madrid could do worse than follow the Hemingway trail, not just because so much of it still exists, but because he was a man of taste and did not waste his time on the second-rate.
Across the road from the hotel is the Prado, one of the world’s greatest collection of paintings, where Hemingway caught up with his beloved Bruegels and Goyas and where I could spend an entire visit in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s
Garden Of Earthly Delights
.
Then follow him, for refreshment, into the old quarter west of the Prado, where the narrow streets bear the names of writers like Cervantes and Lope de Vega and take a beer at the Cerveceria Alemana, a 96-year-old bierkeller with Spanish tiling and an open unfussy interior, which was one of Hemingway’s favourites. (If you feel oppressed by the presence of the Great Man, I recommend La Venencia just round the corner in the Calle Echegaray, of which there is no record of him ever entering. The speciality is sherry served from the cask and the peeling walls are stained a rich tobacco brown.)
Hemingway would likely have repaired at this point for a cocktail in the Art Deco elegance of Chicote on the Gran Via, a cocktail bar founded in 1931 ‘to promote talk and opinion’. Chicote earned Hemingway’s undying loyalty by never closing throughout the bombardments of the Spanish Civil War. There’s another photo of him here, from 1959, frail and bearded.
Though you may be hungry by now, remember that Spanish restaurants don’t expect you for dinner until well after nine. Hemingway fans will take his recommendation and head straight for Casa Botin, which has been serving meals for over 200 years and whose wood-fired ovens turn out herds of roast suckling pig every night. It’s easy to find. Down the steps at the south-west corner of the Plaza Mayor, into Calle Cuchilleros (Knife-maker Street) and it’s practically next door to a restaurant with a large sign, ‘Hemingway Never Ate Here’.
As it is inconceivable that anyone but an invalid should be in bed in Madrid before one-thirty, I’m easily tempted into a post-prandial night-cap. We head for the focal point of the old city, the wide cobbled expanse of the seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor with, at its centre, a fine statue of Philip III on a charger. The Plaza is grand, but car-free and friendly and full of bars which make it almost impossible to cross without feeling thirsty.
Bar Andalu, like Botin, is traditional, but ‘traditional’ in Spain is not so much of a tourist board cliche as it is elsewhere, and generally means something still very close to the spirit of the country.
Three great bulls’ heads loom out of the wall surrounded by an exhaustive collection of framed photographs showing matadors in moments of cape-swirling glory or gory and gruesome injury.
Machismo drips from its tiled and trophied walls, and it is perhaps no coincidence that, as I eventually leave to totter home, I notice for the first time the truly heroic proportions of the testicles on Philip III’s horse.
H emingway, Spain and bullfighting are inseparable. After his visit in 1923 in which he wanted to live where the bullfighters lived, he was, as you might say, hooked.
He returned year after year. The bullfighter first appears in his books in
The Sun Also Rises
and, a few years later, in an exhaustive
aficionado’s
guide called
Death in the
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