Madrid spent most of its history refusing to build tall, and then, in a strip a few kilometres long, changed its mind entirely. This walk follows that change of heart — from the rebuilt Santiago Bernabéu up to the four towers that finally gave the city a skyline.
Start at the Bernabéu, newly wrapped in curving steel, and head north into AZCA, the business district Madrid laid out in the 1960s as its answer to a downtown. The Torre Picasso — Yamasaki's white slab, brother to the lost World Trade Center — once ruled here; now it's dwarfed. Cross the raised concrete deck of the Plaza de Picasso, an unloved, oddly compelling piece of 1970s planning, then cut through the arcades of Nuevos Ministerios, all 1930s brick sobriety.
Then the long pull north to the Cuatro Torres, four glass towers on Real Madrid's old training pitch, the tallest in Spain. They work best from below, read as one gesture against the sky. End at Caleido, where the city simply stops, look back down the avenue you've climbed, and take the metro home from Begoña.
