Friend’s Testimony

I arrived in Madrid in a fairly typical way for a solo student traveller– on the cheapest intercity train I could buy, going from one budget hostel to another as I arrived in Atocha railway station for the last leg of a solo holiday through Paris and Sevilla. This was my first solo travelling experience, and despite being an undergraduate Spanish student, I still had concerns about my ability to navigate the language, customs, and even at times the streets of Spain’s capital especially as a solo lesbian traveller. As much as I was prepared to explore Madrid, my excitement was balanced with a certain level of trepidation.

However, these fears proved themselves to be completely unwarranted as I found myself welcomed with open arms into Madrid’s queer community. I had already spent weeks scouring through the Pride Chueca site for recommendations of restaurants, clubs, and hidden gems beforehand, and had joined La Tribu, Pride Chueca’s queer madrilenian Telegram chat, so that on the very day of my arrival, I ended up in an organised meetup in El Retiro. Rather than getting off the train to a hectic rush of metro tickets and Google Maps, I spent over an hour decompressing and chatting in Madrid’s beautiful park over croquetas and tortilla. It was a beautiful welcome to the city, and a community that I cannot recommend joining enough.

Some of my strongest recommendations for solo trips to Madrid are little more than echoes of countless other travel guides– places which receive well-deserved hype because they really are that good. El Tigre cider bar, for example, I discovered through this very website, and for €7 I ordered a tankard of cider (perfect on a hot late-August night after watching the sunset from the Temple of Debod) and received alongside it a plate practically overflowing with complementary tapas. Similarly, Madrid’s art galleries really do deserve the praise– the Prado was excellent (albeit inevitably busy– get there early!) and the Museo Nacional Centro del Arte Reina Sofia was fantastic, with works from some of my favourite modern artists including Joan Miró and Teresa Solar Abboud. And, of course, lesbian tourism in Madrid truly cannot be discussed without a mention of Fulanita de Tal.

It’s the top result for every search of Madrid’s lesbian scene, and for good reason– neither the small Northern English town I come from nor the city I moved to for university have anything close to a dedicated lesbian bar, so Fulanita blew my mind. I visited on a Saturday night after an evening tapeando in the Mercado San Antón (by far the best food market in Madrid in my opinion, both in terms of quality and price) and enjoying pinchos topped with sobrasada, goats’ cheese, and cinnamon apple jam, skewered grilled chorizo, and cured fish gildas in the market, followed by a gorgeous brandy sour from the rooftop cocktail bar. By the time I arrived at Fulanita at 10PM, it was practically packed– the atmosphere was buzzing, and I quickly met several other solo travellers and spent the night chatting, dancing, and drinking. A word of warning though– the drinks served in Fulanita have a lethally strong spirit-to-mixer ratio, which meant that they were brilliantly good value, but left me with a hangover that could only be cured with udon soup from Yan Ken Pon in Lavapiés and a morning spent staggering around the Museo de San Isidro– arguably a small price to pay for a night at the heart of the lesbian scene!

Overall, Madrid is a fantastic city for solo travelling, and even as a queer female traveller on my own I felt safe and welcomed into the city, especially with the lovely progressive atmosphere of Chueca. It’s a city where you can experience the bustle and excitement of a night out on the town in the countless bars of Chueca and the quiet, slow-paced holiday vibes of wandering around art galleries or even simply sitting on the grass in El Retiro, sunbathing and reading a book. It’s affordable enough as a student travelling alone, and easy to navigate and organise a holiday– if I could do it on my first solo trip, then it’s surely pretty foolproof! Even so, here are my top five pieces of advice for student or first-timer solo travellers visiting Madrid for the first time: