Ernest Hemingway in Madrid: The City That Taught Him to Write

There's a question I get from clients who love Hemingway and are coming to Madrid for the first time. They want to know which bar to go to, which table to sit at, and what to order. And I understand the impulse — but I always tell them the same thing: the places matter less than understanding why he needed them.

Hemingway arrived in Madrid in the 1920s as a young journalist still figuring out what kind of writer he wanted to be. He left — repeatedly, obsessively, over the following two decades — as someone who had found the city that showed him. Not Paris, not Key West, not Havana, Madrid. A capital on a high Castilian plateau with a particular quality of light and a particular relationship with time that suited the way he wanted to see things.

The places where he drank, wrote, and filed dispatches under bombardment are still there — quieter now, and more layered with time, but still entirely themselves. For those who want to walk these streets properly, we know them well.

At a Glance:

• Why Hemingway and Madrid Are Inseparable
• The Gran Vía: A Boulevard Under Fire
• How He Used the City: Bars as a Method of Work
• Death, Beauty, and the Madrid He Recognized
• The Places That Remain
• Sobrino de Botín: Where the Novel Ends
• Walk Madrid with Letango Tours
• FAQs: Your Hemingway Madrid Questions Answered

Why Hemingway and Madrid Are Inseparable

Hemingway considered Madrid the most authentically Spanish city in the country. Not Seville, not Granada, not Barcelona — cities that had more obvious seductions to offer a foreign writer. Madrid, he felt, was the real thing: undecorated, unsentimental, and entirely itself.

He loved it for exactly the things that disappear the moment a city decides to make itself easier. Its late hours. Its refusal to hurry. Its bars where serious conversations lasted until three in the morning and nobody apologized for it. Its insistence that eating and drinking were worthy of the same attention as any other art form.

Matar la noche — killing the night — was already embedded in Madrid's vocabulary long before Hemingway arrived. The phrase dates to the Siglo de Oro, when the capital's taverns and theaters turned the act of staying out until dawn into something closer to a civic value. "Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night," someone once wrote — and whether the line is borrowed or invented, it has always been true. Centuries later, La Movida Madrileña turned that same impulse into outright cultural rebellion. Hemingway landed somewhere in the middle of that tradition and recognized it immediately as his own.

The Gran Vía: A Boulevard Under Fire

Madrid's great early 20th-century boulevard was completed just in time for a war. During the Siege of Madrid — which lasted from 1936 to 1939 — the Gran Vía was shelled so regularly by Nationalist artillery that Madrileños nicknamed it la avenida del obús: Howitzer Avenue. Hemingway walked it daily.

He was staying at the Hotel Florida, which stood where a modern commercial block now stands — a small plaque on the wall is the only trace. The entire international press corps was based there: Martha Gellhorn, John Dos Passos, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro. Most of them evacuated as the bombardment intensified. Hemingway stayed and kept filing.

What that period did to his writing is worth understanding before you walk the street. The prose he produced during the siege has a quality of compressed attention that is unlike anything he wrote elsewhere. Short sentences. No wasted words. The feeling that each detail matters because time is genuinely uncertain. Critics have argued for decades about the sources of that style. Having stood on the Gran Vía knowing what happened there, I think Madrid itself was a large part of the answer.

Directly opposite where the Hotel Florida once stood, the Palacio de la Prensa still survives — its neoclassical facade exactly as it was, almost entirely unnoticed by the people walking past it every day. It is one of the most historically loaded buildings in the city.

Curiosity worth knowing: Room 108 of the Hotel Florida was shared by Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent who became his third wife. Their relationship began in the bar downstairs. Gellhorn later wrote about this period with a clarity and precision that, in several respects, surpasses Hemingway's own account. Worth reading alongside For Whom the Bell Tolls.

How He Used the City: Bars as a Method of Work

 Hemingway's relationship with Madrid's bar culture was not recreational. It was professional. He wrote at café tables, conducted interviews in tascas, gathered intelligence, and filed dispatches from wherever he happened to have good light and a reliable supply of something worth drinking. The bars were his office, his research method, and his subject matter simultaneously.

One bar in particular became his most faithful haunt — the place he returned to most consistently across multiple visits and multiple decades. He had a regular table. The staff knew his order. In a city that values loyalty to its neighborhood bar above almost everything, that constituted the highest form of integration.

Another, on the Gran Vía, was a different kind of place. Art deco interior, cocktails, a mixed clientele that during the Civil War included Republican officers, international journalists, and — as the evening progressed — others. Hemingway used it as a meeting point, a place to gather the kind of information that doesn't appear in official dispatches. There are things still on offer there that don't appear on any menu — details passed down by word of mouth for generations and genuinely worth knowing about.

Then there is a sherry bar a short walk away that serves nothing but fino, manzanilla, amontillado, oloroso, and palo cortado — poured from barrels, written in chalk on the wooden counter. It has maintained a rule against cameras since the Civil War that has never been lifted. Order a glass. Do not take out your phone. Some places survive precisely because of what they refuse to become.

If you want to understand the full city that shaped all of this, our 48 Hours in Madrid guide maps the neighborhoods, museums, and restaurants that define Madrid today.

Death, Beauty, and the Madrid He Recognized

There is a thread connecting the bullfights, the flamenco, and the Civil War dispatches that runs through everything Hemingway wrote about Spain. He understood — and Madrid confirmed for him — that the most serious art is made by people who have looked directly at mortality and refused to look away.

On Plaza de Santa Ana, a flamenco venue whose hand-painted ceramic facade — installed in 1914, scenes from Andalucía in blue and white — is among the most striking in the city. Hemingway came here in the evenings to hear cante jondo, deep flamenco song, on the nights when the Civil War allowed. His relationship with flamenco was serious and considered: he understood it as part of the same cultural universe as bullfighting — an art form that dealt directly with tragedy, beauty, and mortality. It was research and devotion simultaneously.

Death in the Afternoon, his extraordinary meditation on bullfighting, could only have been written by someone who had spent serious time in Madrid — not just watching fights, but absorbing the city's particular refusal to sentimentalize experience. The Barrio de las Letras, where Cervantes died in 1616 and where Hemingway spent most of his evenings, is literally paved with quotations from Spain's greatest writers, set into the cobblestones beneath your feet. Walk slowly along Calle Huertas and look down — most visitors walk straight over them without noticing. It is one of the best public art projects in Madrid and costs nothing.

He understood that he was drinking in bars that had been serving writers for four centuries and that this continuity was not incidental but essential. Hemingway was not the first — and not the last. If you want to follow that thread further, our blog traces other artists and writers who left their mark on this city, including Cervantes in Madrid.

The Places That Remain

What is remarkable about Hemingway's Madrid is how much of it still exists. The bar where he wrote every morning, the venue on the Gran Vía where he gathered intelligence over cocktails, the flamenco stage on Plaza de Santa Ana, the sherry bar that has kept its Civil War rule against cameras intact — all still operating, all substantially unchanged. This is not common. Most cities have renovated away their 20th-century past in the name of modernity or tourism. Madrid has done this in some neighborhoods and refused to do it in others, and the neighborhoods where it refused happen to be exactly the ones Hemingway inhabited.

There is a photograph of him at his regular table in one of these bars — not prominently displayed, not labeled, positioned exactly as it would be in any neighborhood place that happened to have a photo of a regular customer. Most visitors walk straight past it. Knowing where it is, and why it matters, is the kind of thing that comes from walking these streets with someone who has spent years earning the details — which is exactly what our Hemingway Madrid tour is built around.

Sobrino de Botín: Where the Novel Ends

Sobrino de Botín holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest restaurant in the world, in continuous operation since 1725. Its wood-fired horno de asar — the original oven, still in daily use — produces cochinillo asado that has made it famous across three centuries.

Hemingway ends The Sun Also Rises with his protagonist Jake Barnes eating roast suckling pig here and drinking three bottles of Rioja Alta. "It was one of the best restaurants in the world," he wrote. The setting is unchanged: vaulted brick cellars, wooden beams, ceramic tiles, and the smell of the wood fire drifting up from the kitchen.

Two things worth knowing before you go: the young Francisco Goya worked here as a waiter before his career as a painter took off — the restaurant has the documentation to prove it. And the roasting oven has never once been extinguished since 1725. It has been burning continuously for 300 years.

Some things in this city simply refuse to stop.