The wind hits you first. Seventeen stories up, standing on the rooftop terrace of what was once Spain's tallest building, the air moves differently — cooler, faster, carrying the faint diesel-and-jasmine signature of a Madrid evening in motion. Below, Gran Vía bends like a river of headlights. The Royal Palace holds the last of the sun on its limestone face. You are holding a gin tonic you didn't order — someone in your group did, and it appeared, and now it's in your hand, and honestly, this is fine. This is better than fine. You are standing inside a building that has dominated the Plaza de España skyline since 1953, a Brutalist-meets-Art Deco colossus that spent years as a half-abandoned monument to Franco-era ambition before Riu gutted it, polished it, and turned it into something unexpectedly alive.

The Edificio España has always been a building people photograph from the outside. Postcards, film backdrops, the establishing shot of a hundred Spanish movies. What nobody expected was that the inside would become the reason to visit Plaza de España — not the Cervantes monument, not the gardens, not the view of the Templo de Debod at dusk. The hotel. The absurd, sprawling, endlessly feeding hotel.

A Room That Knows When to Be Quiet

The rooms are large by Madrid standards, which means they're enormous by European hotel standards. Mine faces Gran Vía, and the double glazing performs a small miracle: the avenue's chaos — taxi horns, the shriek of a moped, someone arguing passionately about football at 11 PM — registers as a low, pleasant hum. A white-noise machine you didn't ask for. The bed is firm without being punishing, dressed in that particular shade of hotel white that suggests someone irons the pillowcases. The bathroom has actual counter space, a detail so rare in European city hotels that I photograph it out of sheer disbelief and send it to a friend who will understand.

What defines this room isn't luxury in the traditional sense — there are no velvet headboards, no Diptyque candles, no handwritten welcome note from a manager named Alejandro. It's scale. The ceilings are high enough that the air circulates properly. The desk is wide enough to actually work at. The closet could hold a week's worth of clothes without the Tetris game most city hotels demand. Riu has done something clever here: they've taken the bones of a mid-century office tower and leaned into the proportions rather than fighting them.

Waking up here feels unhurried. The light enters gradually — Madrid faces west, so mornings are gentle, the sun still climbing behind you, warming the room by degrees. I lie there longer than I should, watching the ceiling brighten, listening to the building settle into its day shift. There's a particular pleasure in staying at a hotel that doesn't try to be intimate. Riu Plaza España is enormous — 585 rooms, multiple restaurants, conference facilities, a lobby that could host a small political rally — and it wears that scale honestly. You are not pretending to be in a boutique. You are in a palace of efficiency, and the efficiency is the comfort.

“You are in a palace of efficiency, and the efficiency is the comfort.”

And then there's the buffet. I need to talk about the buffet. I am not, generally, a buffet person. Buffets in most hotels feel like a concession — a way to feed three hundred people without hiring enough waitstaff. Here, the spread is a genuine spectacle: a Serrano ham carving station where a man in a white coat works with the focused attention of a surgeon, a juice bar pressing Valencia oranges in real time, a pastry section that would embarrass several standalone bakeries I've visited in the Malasaña neighborhood. There are Indian dishes, sushi, a full English, three kinds of eggs cooked to order. It is excessive and unapologetic and — here's the thing — actually good. Not buffet-good. Good. I go back for a second plate of the tortilla española, which has that slightly runny center that means someone back there cares.

The honest beat: the lobby can feel like an airport terminal during peak check-in. Groups arrive in waves, luggage carts multiply, the front desk queue stretches. If you need a quiet, curated arrival experience — the kind where someone remembers your name and offers you a glass of cava — this is not your hotel. Riu Plaza España operates at volume, and volume has a sound. But the trade-off is real: by the time you're upstairs, settled, looking out at a skyline that hasn't changed its essential drama since Hemingway drank his way across it, the lobby is a memory.

Seventeen Floors Closer to the Sun

The rooftop is the move. Two bars occupy the upper floors, and the views are the kind that make you resent every other rooftop bar you've ever visited. The Royal Palace sits to the west, the Almudena Cathedral beside it, the Casa de Campo stretching into green distance beyond. To the east, Gran Vía narrows into its canyon of neon and stone. At sunset, the light turns the city's terra-cotta rooftops into something between copper and gold, and for ten minutes, nobody on the terrace speaks. They just watch. I have been to rooftop bars in Bangkok, New York, Dubai. This one earns its view because the building was here first — it doesn't borrow the skyline, it belongs to it.

Location deserves a sentence, because it's almost unfairly good. Plaza de España metro station sits directly below. Gran Vía — the shopping artery, the Broadway of Madrid — begins at your door. The Templo de Debod is a ten-minute walk. The Palacio Real, fifteen. You can be eating cochinillo in a Segovia-bound train within forty minutes of leaving the lobby. I've stayed at boutique hotels in Chueca and Lavapiés that required three metro changes to reach the Prado; here, it's a straight shot on Line 1.

What Stays

What I carry from this hotel is not a room or a meal but a specific ten seconds: standing on the rooftop, the wind pulling at my jacket, watching a plane cross the pink sky above the Casa de Campo while the city below shifted from day to night like someone slowly turning a dimmer switch. The whole of Madrid, held in one glance.

This is a hotel for people who want Madrid at their feet without paying Madrid's boutique-hotel premium — travelers who value location, space, and a breakfast that could carry you to a late dinner. It is not for anyone who needs a hotel to whisper. Riu Plaza España doesn't whisper. It stands on Gran Vía with its chest out, seventeen stories of mid-century confidence, and dares you to look away.

Standard doubles start around $151 per night — less than a decent dinner for two in the Salamanca district, and you wake up inside the most photographed building on the most famous street in Spain.