Retiro Park Guided Segway Tour with Crystal Palace Madrid

The Casa de Fieras and the Cecilio Rodríguez Gardens

Retiro Park was once the royal grounds of the Buen Retiro palace in the seventeenth century, and it opened to the public in the late nineteenth century. It covers around 118 hectares in the middle of Madrid. The tour begins near the Casa de Fieras, the former royal menagerie and Madrid's first zoo, now a cultural space.

Nearby are the Cecilio Rodríguez Gardens, a quiet corner laid out in the early twentieth century with pergolas, fountains and peacocks. This part of the park is often missed by visitors on foot because of the distances, and the Segway makes it easy to reach and to answer the question of what to see in Retiro Park.

The Fallen Angel and the Rose Garden

The Fuente del Ángel Caído is one of the most unusual monuments in Madrid: a bronze statue of the devil falling from grace, created by Ricardo Bellver and installed in 1878. It is often described as one of the few public statues of Lucifer in the world, and the city says it stands at 666 metres above sea level.

Close by is La Rosaleda, the park's rose garden, laid out in the early twentieth century, with around four thousand rose bushes that bloom brilliantly from May to June. The Retiro rose garden is best visited in spring, and your guide adjusts the ride to the season.

The Crystal Palace

The Palacio de Cristal is the most photographed building in Retiro Park. Built in 1887 by the architect Ricardo Velázquez Bosco as a greenhouse for the Philippines Exhibition, it is a delicate structure of iron and glass that appears to float at the edge of a small lake surrounded by trees.

Today it hosts art exhibitions, and entry is usually free. From the Segway you can stop in front of the pavilion and take photographs, and your guide explains its history and design. The Crystal Palace in Retiro is one of the best answers to where to take a photo in Madrid.

The Great Lake, the Monument to Alfonso XII and the Parterre

The Estanque Grande is the large lake in the centre of the park, where you can watch rowing boats in good weather. It is overlooked by the Monument to Alfonso XII, a curved colonnade with an equestrian statue, built in the early 1920s.

The ride ends at the Parterre, a French-style formal garden, where stands El Ahuehuete, a Montezuma cypress planted in the early seventeenth century, said to be the oldest tree in Madrid. Retiro Park is part of the UNESCO-listed landscape of the Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, and the ride back to the start takes only a few minutes.