Gran Via: arquitecture & history

The Hotel Praktik Metropol rises over Madrid’s Gran Via, known to the locals as the capital’s Broadway. When you’re standing before this majestic building of marble and pale stone, it’s difficult not to feel as if you were in a Madrid version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, since the Gran Via is the main thoroughfare in an area that combines cosmopolitan buildings of incomparable elegance and architectural value with the most rabid modernity. It is where the greatest number of theatres, cinemas and shops are concentrated in the city, which makes a stroll down the Gran Vía obligatory for both visitors and residents. When the sun goes down, devoting an evening to enjoying musical comedies in Madrid is an indispensable rendezvous, and returning to your luminous hotel in the Gran Via makes the perfect ending.

From the time of its construction at the beginning of the 20th century, the stretch of the Gran Via where the Hotel Praktik Metropol stands has been the perfect nexus of luxury, culture and design. Writer Ernest Hemingway was one of the many historic personalities who admired the hotel’s sophisticated cream façade covered with balconies and large windows; he could see it from the office across the street where he worked as a foreign correspondent. The Telefónica building where he wrote his stories, standing right across the Hotel Praktik Metropol, was the first high-rise building in Europe.

The ground floor of the Hotel Praktik Metropol is framed by an exquisite canopy made of wrought iron, fine wood and glass, which is kept in perfect condition. Now occupied by a fast food restaurant, it was for many years the headquarters of the Aleixandre jeweller’s shop, a business premises of singular beauty. The elegant yet mold-breaking style of the various floors of the Praktik Metropol jibes perfectly with the concept of a design hotel on Madrid's Gran Via.

Praktik Metropol building has been completely restored to maintain its original elegance and its unmistakable mixture of American and French styles that was so characteristic of the most sophisticated tastes in European capitals in the first years of the 20th century. In its interior, the building’s native beauty has been preserved while adding the design and convenience features that typify Praktik and Contemporain Studio. Breathe in history and don't miss your opportunity to stay in a centrally located Madrid design hotel at low-cost prices.