Living in Cortes, Madrid

Cortes is barrio 13 of Distrito Centro, and at 0.59 km2 with about 11,000 residents it is the smallest and least populated of the six. Its boundaries are the Paseo del Prado to the east, Calle de Atocha to the south, Calle de la Cruz and Calle de Sevilla to the west, and Calle de Alcalá and the Gran Vía to the north. The official name comes from the Congreso de los Diputados, the lower house of the Spanish parliament, which stands on the Carrera de San Jerónimo inside the barrio.

What it is

The literary quarter of Madrid, and the pedestrian bridge between the Puerta del Sol and the museum mile. Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Góngora all lived and worked in these blocks in the seventeenth century, and the street names and the brass lettering set into the pavement still say so. The Casa Museo Lope de Vega on Calle Cervantes is the writer's actual house. The Teatro Español on the Plaza de Santa Ana and the Ateneo on Calle del Prado are the two institutions the barrio is built around.

Physically it is a grid of narrow streets on a slope, running downhill from Calle de Alcalá to Calle de Atocha, dense with four to six storey buildings and almost no open space apart from the Plaza de Santa Ana and the Plaza del Ángel.

Who lives here

Small in number and heavily international. The resident population is the lowest of any Centro barrio, and a large share of the building stock has been converted to tourist accommodation or to offices connected to the parliament, the ministries and the law firms on Calle del Prado. What remains long term skews towards professionals, journalists, parliamentary staff, and a steady flow of researchers and postgraduate students who want to be within walking distance of the Prado, the Thyssen and the Reina Sofía. Shared flats exist but are the exception rather than the norm, and they are expensive per room.

What it's like during the day

Calm in the mornings, busy from lunchtime. The upper edge along Calle de Alcalá and the Carrera de San Jerónimo is institutional: the Congress, the ministries, the banks. The middle of the barrio, along Calle Huertas, Calle del Prado and Calle Cervantes, is quiet enough before noon to hear your own steps, then fills with a mixture of museum-goers and office lunch trade. Calle Huertas is pedestrianised for much of its length, which makes daytime walking pleasant and evening noise unavoidable.

What it's like in the evening

Huertas is one of the oldest going-out streets in Madrid and it behaves like one. From about ten at night, Friday and Saturday, the stretch between the Plaza de Santa Ana and Calle de Atocha is a continuous crawl of bars. The Plaza de Santa Ana itself has terraces open most of the year. Two streets away, on Calle Cervantes or Calle de Lope de Vega, the volume drops sharply. This is the single fact that decides whether a room here works: in Cortes, the street matters more than the barrio.

Getting around

Excellent, and almost entirely on foot. Inside the barrio you have Antón Martín and Estación del Arte on line 1, Sevilla and Banco de España on line 2. Sol, at the northwestern corner, adds lines 1, 2 and 3 plus Cercanías. Atocha, the main rail station for Cercanías, regional and high-speed services, is a ten-minute walk down Calle de Atocha. Practically speaking you can reach both airports, both main stations and every university campus in the city without a change more complicated than one metro interchange.

Eating and shopping

Dense and uneven. Calle Huertas and the Plaza de Santa Ana are aimed at visitors and priced accordingly. The everyday layer sits on Calle de León, Calle de las Huertas' side streets and around Antón Martín, where the Mercado de Antón Martín on Calle de Santa Isabel, just over the southern boundary, is the closest proper food market. Small supermarkets are scattered but none of them are large, and a weekly shop usually means a short walk south or a delivery.

When NOT to pick it

If you want space or silence for the money. Cortes has the highest concentration of short-term tourist flats in Centro alongside Sol, and that has pushed the long-term rental price per square metre to the top of the city while shrinking supply. Buildings are old, lifts are not guaranteed, and rooms are small. Noise on the Huertas axis runs to three in the morning at weekends. There is no park inside the barrio: the Retiro is a fifteen-minute walk east, uphill. Pick Cortes if being able to walk everywhere is worth more to you than square metres, and check the exact street before you commit. It is the right choice if you want the Prado, Sol and Atocha all on foot and never to need the metro for daily life; the wrong one if you want space, a park or silence, and for those you should look at Jerónimos immediately east across the Paseo del Prado for the same museums with far less noise, or further out at Pacífico or Delicias, where the same money buys a considerably bigger room.