Madrid

🍂 What's on in Madrid: September 25

It’s pumpkin spice café con leche season in the city.

Madrid | Issue #163

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Here Are 5 Things to Do in Madrid This Weekend

It’s Friday again!

And there’s no easy way to say this — fall (aka “autumn”) is here, and the dewy, sweet mornings of summer are now nothing more than a quasi-tactile memory.

• Welcome to another year of La Rentrée, a chicer, more French way of saying “la vuelta al cole” (aka back to school). Just like Satan, it’s got many names. And local bars and nightclubs struggle to find one that doesn’t convey the depression of summer’s ending. “Welcome Back Party!” or “Return to the City!” parties are everywhere to be seen. As if using English and exclamation marks made it less painful.

• Gone are the days of hanging out with your friends at Cibeles until dawn while singing Superestrella, or waking up to the foamy white noise of the Mediterranean splashing against the rocks below your rental apartment’s balcony. That gem of a gelato place by the beach you discovered with your friends? Gone forever (or at least until next summer).

• Face it, friend. The maladies of leading an adult life have finally caught up with us once more, and we march back towards Madrid not sad because it’s over, but joyous because it happened (especially before the rise of the AI overlords that will kill us all).

Anyway, happy weekend! (And welcome back!)

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1. 🎭 Manon Lescaut: Watch Puccini ruin everyone’s life (beautifully)

Now that we’re all back to the good old routine, we may need some cathartic experience that feels like letting out a long, horrific internal scream. So why not check out the opera? It’s high-brow, and it makes you look like an intellectual in front of your date.

• Hear me out! There’s doomed romance, really bad decisions, and people singing very loudly (pretty much your summer 2026 experience). Puccini’s Manon Lescaut has returned to Madrid’s opera house for the first time in 102 years, opening the Teatro Real’s new season.

• This was the opera that made Puccini a star. His third opera and first major success follows Manon, a young French woman being sent to a convent who instead falls for the dashing Des Grieux and runs away with him to Paris. Unfortunately, love is nice, but poverty is not, and Manon eventually leaves him for the considerably richer Geronte. Things do not improve from there. (See? Never choose money over love.)

• The new production puts Manon on a literal merry-go-round. The action unfolds around a rotating carousel-like structure that transforms into a bar, prison, and other settings, turning her increasingly disastrous choices into an endless cycle she can’t escape.

The whole thing is in Italian (with Spanish and English subtitles), but honestly, who cares. It’s the opera.

🎭 What: Manon Lescaut by Giacomo Puccini

📍 Where: Teatro Real, Plaza de Isabel II, Madrid

📅 When: Through Oct. 11, check website for hours.

🎟️ Tickets start at €19

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2. 🎨 Estampa Contemporary Art Fair 2026: Pretend you’re a rich art collector for the afternoon

If Madrid Fashion Week left you wanting to stand around another enormous IFEMA pavilion looking sophisticated, we have good news: Estampa Contemporary Art Fair is back this weekend, bringing dozens of galleries and a frankly dangerous amount of art you may suddenly decide to buy even though your €3.99/month Revolut card just can’t take it anymore.

• Estampa is one of Madrid’s big contemporary-art market events, bringing together established Spanish galleries including Max Estrella, Espacio Mínimo, Cayón and VETA alongside younger galleries and emerging spaces from across Spain and abroad.

• This year’s guest artist is Esther Ferrer, one of the pioneers of performance and conceptual art in Spain. The 89-year-old artist (whose work spans performance, photography, collage, drawing and sound) will present her latest project at the fair.

• Don’t worry if you’re not actually buying anything. Beyond browsing gallery stands, Estampa includes talks, debates, curated sections and Ensayo Futuro, a program dedicated to emerging galleries and experimental spaces.

• But people definitely are buying. The number of artists whose work sold at Estampa nearly doubled between 2017 and 2025, from 120 to 233. So maybe practice thoughtfully staring at something before whispering, “Interesting use of space.”

And remember, you don’t need to understand contemporary art. Just tilt your head slightly and say, “This piece interrogates the liminal space between materiality and absence, while simultaneously destabilizing our relationship with the object as object,” or something like that.

🖼️ What: Estampa Contemporary Art Fair - 34th edition

📍 Where: Pavilion 5, IFEMA, Avenida del Partenón 5, Madrid

📅 When: Sept. 24–27. Check website for opening hours.

🎟️ Tickets start at €22

3. 🇯🇵 Spend the weekend in Japan without leaving Madrid