Affiliate disclosure

The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, nobody pays to be featured, and several of the best museums in this city pay us nothing at all.

Which links are affiliate links

Where a museum sells admission through a booking platform, the "Check availability" button opens that listing carrying our partner tag. Those platforms are GetYourGuide, Viator and Tiqets. If you book after clicking one of those links, the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns on the sale. Your price is identical to going straight to the listing yourself, and no fee is ever added for reaching it through this site.

That covers 17 of the 27 museums and attractions listed here. The other 10 carry no affiliate link of any kind.

The museums we earn nothing on

Not every museum sits on a booking platform, and we do not pretend otherwise. Ten of Madrid's museums, most of them the state-run ones at around three euros, sell tickets only through their own official channel. Those pages link straight there, which pays us nothing, and the link sits in plain view rather than buried under something we do get paid for.

Then there are the free ones. Seven venues in this city are walk-in free, from the Templo de Debod to the Casa Museo Lope de Vega, and free entry has no ticket, no commission and no buy button. The same goes for the free hours at the paid museums. The Prado's last two hours each day, the Thyssen on Mondays, the Reina Sofía in the evening: telling you about those windows costs us money every time, and they are on the pages anyway, because a guide that hides them is not a guide.

What the commission does not change

Inclusion and ordering are editorial decisions. No museum pays to be listed, to be featured, or to rank higher, and a museum we earn on and a museum we do not are treated the same way on the page. Ratings and review counts are the booking platforms' own published figures, shown only where they are real and never invented; where a figure is missing, the page says so. The affiliate model is simply what lets this guide stay free to read while still telling you plainly which museum is worth your day.

Questions about any of this are welcome on the contact page. How we handle data is set out in the privacy policy.