Fun Indoor Activities for Kids in Madrid: Museo del Prado Art Museum

 In my on-going quest to find fun, indoor activities for kids in Madrid*, I present to you Museo del Prado.

The very steep steps of Goya Entrance to Museo del Prado
 (walk around the corner for the Jerónimos entrance that has no steps)

El Museo del Prado. It's where you go to see Velazquez's Las Meninas, Goya's Black Paintings, and Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Is Museo del Prado kid-friendly? Not really.

Where: Museo del Prado is not particularly convenient to any metro stop. My recommendation to get to the Prado? Take a bus that stops at the Neptuno fountain stop. It's right across the street from the Prado ticket counter. Or a taxi. 

If the weather is nice and you don't mind the walk,  you can take the metro. Sol metro station is what Google maps suggests, but Antón Martín metro stop is technically the closest and is a downhill walk along Calle de Moratín to El Prado, about a quarter of a mile. 

Cost: Free for kids! Rather expensivo for adults: 15 euros each, unless you qualify for free admission. In the past, I recommended waiting until the free hours for kids, but with Covid, it seems like the museum is limiting entrance to 50 people every 15 minutes, so the free line can move veeerrrry slowly. 

Logistics: I overheard a tourist from Texas lamenting the tiny bathrooms at Museo del Prado. Which is true--there are a lot of two-stall bathrooms that have huge lines at different points in the day. But there is a great big bathroom in the Edificio Jerónimo part of the museum next to the cafetería. There are also individual/handicapped family bathrooms with changing tables tucked away in different corners of the museum.

There are also little "Rest Areas" (Zonas de descanso) which are narrow corridors off the main galleries with comfortable couches and sculptures that are good for resting and face windows with a bit of a view. Not many of the galleries have benches, and the benches that are there tend to be small and made of wood: not ideal for tired kids.

There is a nice cafeteria, but the lines can be long. Also, you might want to chug water before you go inside since I could not find any drinking fountains in the museum, and the line for food/water can be super long. There is an outdoor patio with a food stand and you can always go there if the cafeteria line is too long, although the patio is extremely hot since it has very little shade/is located on a concrete hellscape surrounded by glass windows. 

Fun fact: The Prado museum cafeteria has popsicles (polos) in the summer which are an extremely refreshing option to cool off!

Fun for Preschoolers rating: 4/10. It is nice to look at the art, but small kids will not probably find it that interesting, except as a kind of well-air-conditioned maze. Don Loco enjoyed taking the escalators up to the Claustro de los Jerónimos, an indoor atrium space with old sculptures. Museo del Prado's cafeteria has cozy little booths for taking a nice sit and eating a pastry and a coffee after viewing the art.

How to make Museo del Prado fun for kids? There is really nothing at Museo del Prado that is geared toward kids. (They used to have kids' art workshops, and a day camp for elementary schoolers, but for a random visit, really nothing.)

There are paper maps of the museum with little pictures of details of the most famous paintings. Don Loco had fun using the museum map as a kind of scavenger hunt, looking for the room with the painting and then trying to match the picture to the larger painting.

Nota bene: I guess this goes without saying, but a lot of the paintings are quite gory and life-sized. Be prepared for some discussions about why is there so much blood and why are the people so sad in the pictures.