Yoga in Madrid: a yogi's guide to the city

Madrid practises everywhere: on studio floors in Chamberí and Chamartín, on the granite esplanade in front of the Royal Palace, on the lawns of the Retiro at eight in the evening. This is our home city, and this guide covers what a practising visitor actually needs: where the classes are, where the city practises outdoors, and what is under your feet in each place.

Where Madrid practises outdoors

The city's open-air spots differ more by surface than by scenery, so we list both. It is the one column no city guide ever includes, and it decides what your knees and your balance will think of the session.

Granite, gravel, grass and concrete: Madrid will happily lend you the ground. What it will not lend you is the surface.

Eight studios worth knowing

A mix of neighbourhoods and lineages, so there is a room for whatever you practise. Details change with the seasons, so check schedules on their sites.

• Centro Dhara Yoga: the home of Verónica Arroyo, whose story we told in our interview with Verónica. Classes and meditation with a teacher we know and admire.
• Lado B: ashtanga in Madrid with a proper Mysore room, which is still rare in the city. If you practise the series, this is your address.
• Numen Yoga Estudio: vinyasa, rocket and meditation, with an urban, contemporary energy.
• Prevalece: live online classes from Madrid teachers, for keeping the city's yoga in your living room before you arrive or after you leave.
• City Yoga: one of the city's big classic centres, with a wide timetable across yoga styles, pilates and mindfulness.
• Iyengar Centro Yoga-Salud: dedicated Iyengar teaching, with the precision, props and held poses that method is famous for.
• Instituto Yoga Retiro: hatha, kundalini and yin a short walk from the park that gives it its name.
• Bindu, Escuela de Yoga de Chamartín: a neighbourhood school with hatha, kundalini and pranayama, away from the tourist circuits.

One practical note that applies to all of them: rental-mat policies vary from studio to studio, and a borrowed surface is always an unknown handshake. If your practice is regular, the mat is the one piece of the studio worth owning, wherever in Madrid you unroll it.

The rest of a yogi's day

Between classes, the city offers the quiet kind of sightseeing that suits a practice trip: the Real Jardín Botánico next to the Prado, the garden courtyard of the Sorolla Museum, and the rooftop of the Círculo de Bellas Artes for the long view over the city at sunset. None of them ask anything of your hamstrings.

And if your visit lands on a festival weekend, Madrid hosts several of the events in our calendar of yoga festivals and events in Europe, including the mass outdoor classes that fill the Royal Palace esplanade, which is exactly the scene in the photo above.

What to bring

Madrid's practice surfaces run hard: granite, gravel, concrete, and studio floors in between. That is the case for travelling with your own dense mat rather than trusting the ground, and the honest version of that argument, weight included, is in a natural rubber yoga mat for travel. Summer practice here also means sun and sweat, so a surface that grips when damp, like our natural rubber yoga mat, earns its place in the bag.

The short version

Practise outdoors on the Palace granite or the Retiro grass, pick the studio that matches your lineage from the eight above, and bring the one thing the city cannot lend you: a surface you know. Where to practise, and on what, is the wider question of where to practice yoga, and Madrid is simply our favourite answer to it.