Cultural centers in Madrid

One of the biggest attractions which a city can offer is its culture. The visitors wish to meet, learn and enjoy the culture of the place, observing at the same time differences with their own culture. Fortunately for tourists, Madrid is a city immersed in it, with different buildings exclusively destined to exhibit the cultural heritage of Madrid.

CentroCentro

This cultural centre is located in Palacio de Cibeles inside Paseo del Arte. The place works under three fundamental premises about Madrid. The first one is the reflection on urban culture. The second is the offer of cultural information for citizens and tourists. The third one is the execution of exhibitions, workshops, conferences and concerts, among other ways of celebrating the local culture.

 In the main hall, there are informative and interactive screens together with a room so that people can rest and connect to Internet via WIFI. The place presents three options of gastronomy: the restaurant and Colección Cibeles cafeteria on the ground floor; Palacio de Cibeles restaurant on the 6th floor; and Terraza Cibeles also on the 6th floor.

In addition, it has an excellent viewpoint on the last floor called Mirador Madrid, from which the best views of the city can be appreciated.

El Matadero Madrid

The group of pavilions from the beginning of the 20th century located on Manzanares River which worked as Madrid’s slaughter house, today has become a kind of mini city exclusively dedicated to culture. There, different types of sites can be found:

• El Centro Internacional de Artes Vivas: it is about a place dedicated to visual and performing arts with the presence of literature, music and other activities.
• Factoría Cultural: a place designed so that the creators of culture can carry out their projects of freedom. Artists are provided with more than a hundred working spaces and different resources so they can materialize their ideas.
• Casa del Lector: as its name suggests, reading is the premise of this place.
• Extensión AVAM: Artistas Visuales Asociados de Madrid managed this platform to visualize creators’ new content. Here, different projects can be presented to the public and ideas can be exchanged to improve the creations.

Conde Duque

Conde Duque is an immense cultural place with more than 58 thousand square metres in infrastructure. The place has a lot of exhibition rooms, an auditorium, and a theatre where different shows and plays are performed. This place also has the headquarters of Biblioteca Histórica, Hemeroteca Municipal, Biblioteca Digital Memoria de Madrid and Archivo de la Villa.

The history of the place dates back to the years 1700 when it was built with an important barrack under the order of Felipe V. It receives its name in honour to Conde de Lemos and Duque de Betwick y Liria, who married the duke of Alba’s daughter. This family preserved the terrains until 1943 when it was almost destroyed by a fire. Ayuntamiento de Madrid acquired it in 1969 and it was the one in charge of carrying out its restoration.