Atocha Station

Sunday, August 20

After having spent almost four weeks in Seville and Granada, we moved to Madrid fro another two weeks. Neither of us had visited Madrid before and we both were excited about the next weeks in the Spanish capital.

Although many people told us that we were crazy to travel to Madrid in the middle of summer, we liked it here right from the start and we enjoyed the many hours of sunshine. Since we worked remotely during the week, as always, we made even more use of our evenings and weekends to stroll through the many beautiful streets of Madrid.

On one of our first afternoons in Madrid, we walked to the city’s main train station – Atocha Station. I really wanted to visit this place because there is a small botanical garden with beautiful plants in the middle of the station. When we arrived at the Atocha train station, Christoph and I were both really impressed because the botanical garden and the plants were much larger than we had imagined. Huge palm trees and even larger Monstera plants grow in the middle of the train station and you feel like you are in a park or a big greenhouse. Until a few years ago there even was a small turtle pond here. However, the pond had to be closed (actually moved to another location in the city) because too many of the city’s residents released their unwanted pet turtles in the pond in the train station hall and over time there were just too many animals for this small pond.

Luckily, the botanical garden in the Atocha train station is worth a visit even without the turtle pond and even if you’re not actually waiting for a train but just want to admire the gigantic tropical plants there!