Opened in 1912 as the largest hotel in Europe, and known for decades as the Westin Palace — rebranded in 2025 after a two-year restoration that brought its famous stained-glass dome back to life.
When it opened on 21 September 1912, the hotel then known simply as the Palace was the largest in Europe, and only the second hotel in the world to give every one of its 800 rooms a private telephone and bathroom — genuinely radical for the era. Its rotunda, capped by an Art Nouveau stained-glass dome designed by Eduardo Ferrés i Puig, became one of Madrid's great interior spaces, and the hotel's guest list over the following century included Salvador Dalí, Ernest Hemingway and Ava Gardner. During the Spanish Civil War, the building served as a hospital, with the space beneath the dome used as an operating theatre. After decades as the Westin Palace under Marriott's Starwood-descended portfolio, the hotel closed for a two-year, multi-million-euro restoration and reopened in March 2025 as The Palace, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Madrid — its 1,875-pane glass dome painstakingly dismantled and restored pane by pane.
On Plaza de las Cortes in the Barrio de las Letras, directly across from the Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums — as central to the "Golden Triangle" museum cluster as the Mandarin Oriental Ritz, its longtime rival a few streets away.
Travellers drawn to grand-scale history with a genuinely famous architectural centrepiece — at 470 rooms, it's considerably larger than the Gran Hotel Inglés or Mandarin Oriental Ritz, so expect more of a grand hotel atmosphere than an intimate boutique one.
The hotel is still commonly listed online under its former name, the Westin Palace — worth searching both names if you're comparing prices or reviews across booking sites.