The Madrid Metro

Like with most of our travels, when we first arrived in Madrid we were a little intimidated with getting to our place and navigating the city's Metro/public transit system. The notes we had written down about how to get to our first destination did not quite match up with what we first encountered. But before we even boarded our first train a nice Metro worker guy handed us a map and it quickly made sense. In fact out of all the places we have traveled to, Madrid's Metro system was among the easiest to figure out.

A typical entrance to a Madrid underground Metro station

The Madrid Metro system is nice for several reasons. First, there are quite a few stations where transferring between lines is possible. And those various transfer points are spread out across Madrid instead of being all focused on one central location. This may be confusing at first, but once you get a map in hand, it makes it very handy because there are always multiple ways to get to your final destination. It's nice to have options.

Second, the trains run very frequently, at least in the more central area we were in. There is no need to memorize a schedule. If you miss a train, there will likely be a another one within 5 minutes. Related to that point is that there are no express trains as far as we know, aka trains that skip over stations. That is always such a huge pain in cities where you not only have to worry about which line to get on, but also whether or not that particular train will stop at your station. Maybe that sucks for people's who's stops are further out of the city, but it was nice for us not to worry about. 

The Madrid Metro system map ( A Handy PDF )

Getting a Metro ticket is pretty straight forward. We always used one of the automated ticketing machines. There are many language options, so we were easily able to switch it to English instructions. The machines take both cash (EURO) and credit card. With a credit card if the transaction is high enough, it may require the use of a PIN which many US credit cards don't have yet. Luckily ours worked just fine. The main two options we were interested in were single tickets or a 10 pack. We used the single ticket the first day to get out of the airport since there is an additional fee to use the airport stations and we weren't sure how that would affect our 10 pack usage. But after that we all bought a 10 pack ticket for around €12.20 each to use over the course of our week in Madrid, which made life super easy. 

The automated Metro ticket machines 

A typical Madrid Metrobus ticket.

Another nice thing about the Metro system was it didn't matter if you got lost. With a single ticket you could make as many transfers as you needed to until you finally existed a station. All the transfers areas are connected past the turnstiles. So even if we had jumped on the wrong line, it would have not been a big deal to jump on another train to take you back. (Note: We never got a chance to use a bus, so I'm not sure if the same is true for those) 

Transfers consist of getting off the train you are on, walking up and then down several flights of stairs or using an escalator, following/finding the color coordinated signs for the new line that you want, and figuring out which direction on that line you want to go; which was usually indicated by the station that was on the end of the line in that direction. The direction of the line you wanted was probably the hardest part to figure out, and even that wasn't too bad assuming you had a map.

A typical Metro underground ticketing/turnstile area

Some of the newer/fancier sliding door "turnstiles"

To use your ticket, simply insert it into the side of the turnstiles. If it is the oldschool turnstile you can walk partially or all the way through and retrieve your ticket from the other side. If it is one of the newer sliding door systems, you pull your ticket out from a slot on top of the system and the doors will open for you to talk through. All the systems have a little display to tell you how many uses you had left on your multi-use ticket.

A train at one of the few stations outside

A pretty typical underground station

And that's the Madrid Metro system. I don't know why I wanted to go into this much detail about the Madrid Metro. I was just impressed with how it worked, so I wanted to write about it. I hope someone else might find this info useful or interesting too.