Map of Hemingway in Madrid

There is a longish list of foreign writers enamoured of Spain: Washington Irving, Richard Ford, George Borrow, and many more (without counting figures in other fields of the arts such as Orson Welles). Perhaps the greatest of them, certainly the most famous, is Ernest Hemingway, who was not only besotted with the country but took it as a central theme in works like The Sun Also Rises, or Death in the Afternoon, which brought him both popular success and critical acclaim. So, like true love, it was a two-way relationship. Of all the places in Spain, the dearest to Hemingway was Madrid, which he first visited in 1923, and to which he was nearly constant for the next forty years (the exception was the decade of the forties, Spain being nominally neutral during the Second World War, but in reality an Axis ally, practically a member: Hemingway stayed away, and did not return until well into the fifties). His presence in Madrid was such that there are establishments which feel it necessary to proclaim that "Hemingway never stayed/drank/ate here" to assert their singularity (in most cases, they simply didn't exist in Hemngway's day), but the Hemingway afficionado will ignore them, and prefer to tread in his footsteps.

Most of Madrid's historic centre can be considered "Hemingway-land," and he might well have been found enjoying a drink in the Plaza Mayor or any of the taverns in Madrid de los Austrias, Hapsburg Madrid. One favourite of his was the Cerveceria Alemana, in the Plaza Santa Ana, about which he said* that it served "the best beer in Spain." Another reason for his loyalty to the Cerveceria Alemana was that it was a haunt of bullfighters and their entourages, and Hemingway loved - and exploited - anything related with Spain's fiesta nacional. These days, the beer is, frankly, not all that special, but the Cerveceria Alemana's marble counter and its tables and woodwork are satisfactorily atmospheric, as are the old photos on the walls, many with a bullfighting theme. You'll find plenty of places nearby to continue a tapas crawl, as well, for this is still one of Madrid's nightlife nerve centres.

The Hemingway follower who wants something more substantial than tapas will want to seek out his preferred restaurant, recommendable in its own right. For Botin, in the Calle Cuchilleros south of the Plaza Mayor, not only has a valid claim to be the oldest restaurant in the world - the young Goya worked here as a dishwasher - but is as good a place as most to try the famous Castilian roast meats and other good Spanish fare. It is satisfactorily convincing, preserving the feel of an eighteenth century inn, and surprisingly is no more expensive than other asadores, indeed compares quite well on this count. Its food is entirely authentic, but it does get a large number of tourist bookings, which is why you should bear two things in mind if you want to lunch or dine there: booking ahead is advisable, often indispensable; and you need to eat a little early by Spanish standards, for the kitchen is orientated towards foreigners who like to dine at eight or nine, and when the more Spanish half-past ten or eleven o'clock comes around, your roast suckling lamb which would have been perfect a little earlier may be a bit dry or even tough. If you are like me, though, you won't mind too much, for Botin is an experience. And the last scene of The Sun Also Rises is set there.

After dinner, a drink, and Hemingway's favourite cocktail bar in Madrid is a short walk away on the Gran Via (which, don't forget, was the height of modernity in the twenties and thirties). The Taberna Chicote (now Museo Chicote) was the chicest, most cosmopolitan place in town, and Hemingway naturally gravitated there. (Chicote still has a special place on the Madrid nightlife map, for it is on the southern frontier of the Chueca district, now adopted by Madrid's gay community as their own and one of the city's liveliest areas. And it is still popular with celebrities, so you never know, you might catch a glimpse of Pedro Almodóvar or Penelope Cruz.) Hemingway's appreciation of Chicote grew as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, for Chicote never closed, even during the Siege of Madrid when the Gran Via was shelled and bombed constantly and was nicknamed the Avenida de los quince y medio, the Avenue of the fifteen-and-a-halves, after the 150 (not 155) millimetre howitzer shells which regularly landed there. Hemingway experienced this at first hand even in his hotel, the Florida, which stood in the Plaza de Callao (a Corte Ingles now occupies the site). Hemingway's room was one of the cheaper, street-facing, vulnerable ones.

Hemingway preferred not to read before sitting down to write, instead taking a walk to put himself in the right frame of mind, perhaps visiting the Museo del Prado, which transported him to what he called a "fourth dimension." He is known to have thought El Greco dazzlingly brilliant, liked Velázquez (while finding him overly concerned with appearances), and to have held Goya in particular awe, recognizing a temprament and genius similar to his own.

But Hemingway's greatest affición was the bullfight, and he made himself an expert in it and in the bullfighters and their troupes whom he admired almost limitlessly. In the twenties, Madrid's main bullring was in the Salamanca district, where the Palacio de Deportes now stands. The Sun Also Rises (1926) gave Hemingway a certain monopoly of the bullfighting theme, at least in the English language, which he later exploited in Death in the Afternoon (1932), where he uses it as a mechanism to set out his view of the country and its people. In 1934, a splendid new, neo-mudéjar bullring, the Plaza de Las Ventas, was inaugurated only a little further away from the centre than the Antigua Plaza de Toros: Las Ventas was to become the most important in the world and to Hemingway, it was a place of veneration, like Wembley to a soccer fan, or the Vatican to a Roman Catholic.

And la corrida, the bullfight, was what attracted Hemingway to another town in the province of Madrid: Aranjuez, better known to most for its Royal Palace, its fabulous gardens, and the extraordinary strawberries it produces. But its bullring is one of the oldest in Spain, and Hemingway found its atmosphere much to his taste, as well as the custom of using your bullfight binoculars to study the young ladies in the stands, attent on the spectacle below.

At the beginning of 1937, the area north of Aranjuez became the scene of one of its most important battles. The rebels wanted to cut the communications between Madrid and the east of the country, Catalonia and, especially, Valencia by driving north-east across the River Jarama. The Battle of Jarama lasted almost the whole of February, 1937, and the part played by the new International Brigades on the Republican side was crucial, though it is now thought that this was more because the Republicans wanted to raise foreign support in this way, by attracting the attention of correspondents like Hemingway. In this, they were successful, for the Battle of Jarama was amply reported by the foreign press, though this did not persuade countries like Britain and France to help the democratic government. The Battle of Jarama resulted in a costly defeat for the Nationalists, so ensuring the failure of the Seige of Madrid. Unfortunately, it was also a costly victory for the Republicans, and the last important battle they would win in the entire war.

On the other side of Madrid, in the Sierra de Guadarrama, Hemingway found the setting for one of his most important novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls. During his time as a Spanish Civil War correspondent in Madrid, he memorized the area around Navacerrada, for he found it spiritually restful and visited it often by car, on foot and on horseback. The bridge which Robert Jordan is sent to blow up in the story really exists and is marked on the map, on the road to Segovia north of the Puerta de Navacerrada, though it is an old stone bridge rather than an iron one.

South of Navacerrada, on the east-facing foothills of the Guadarrama sierra, San Lorenzo de El Escorial and the monumental palace-cum-monastery that is its Royal See were never among Hemingway's favourite places. On the contrary, he thought they represented the most oppressive side of Spanish religion and history. Even so, because of the virtues of its semi-mountainous climate, he stayed there for two months in 1956, in the Hotel Felipe II, which seems to have disappeared (at least I have not been able to find it).

Hemingway's last visit to Madrid was in 1960, when he stayed in the Hotel Suecia, just around the corner from the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Fine Arts Circle, a central institution in Madrid's intellectual life. Hemingway was not the man he had been, though, and was prey to his depression and his alcoholism, and more or less locked himself in his room for the extent of his stay. Michael Palin says that when he did his Hemingway Adventure series for the BBC in 1999, the staff of the Suecia did not even know ("or seem to care," he adds) that Hemingway had been a guest. In 1961, in what was probably suicide, Hemingway died of a shotgun wound. At the time of my writing this, although there is a plaque to Hemingway in the street (Calle Marqués de Riera), the Hotel Suecia is being converted into flats. Last year's bursting of the Spanish real estate bubble means they will be very difficult to sell.

*At least, I think that's what he said - I haven't found the quote, so any clarification either way is welcome. So please leave a comment if you have evidence for or against this or anything else in this article.