El Capricho: the Duchess of Osuna's romantic garden
A lake, a maze, a temple to Bacchus, and the quietest beautiful garden in Madrid. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Palacio de los Duques de Osuna
Start at the little palace the Duchess built as the heart of her estate in the 1780s — a neoclassical box, not a showpiece. The point was never the building; it was everything she laid out around it. Take the path that drops away to the left.

2. El estanque (the lake)
The big irregular lake with the landing stage and the little column-temple across the water. This is the romantic-garden idea in one view — designed to look found, not made. Walk the full shore; the reflections change with every angle.

3. Templete de Baco
The temple to Bacchus on its rise, a circle of columns around the god of wine — a folly with a wink. Climb up to it. From here the lines of the garden open out and you can read how the whole thing was composed as a sequence of surprises.

4. El laberinto (the maze)
The clipped laurel maze, low enough to see over if you cheat, satisfying enough that you won't. Let a child run it if you've brought one; let yourself get briefly, genuinely lost if you haven't.

5. Casa de la Vieja
The 'Old Woman's House', a mock peasant cottage built so aristocrats could play at rustic life — the eighteenth century's idea of a theme park. Period charm and period strangeness in one small building; read it as both.

6. El búnker de Posición Jaca
A Civil War command bunker dug under the garden in 1937 — the Republican army ran a sector from beneath the Duchess's follies. Opening hours are limited and guided; even closed, the entrance is a jolt. The garden's other history, three metres down.

El Capricho: the Duchess of Osuna's romantic garden