Las Ventas Bullring, Madrid: free audio guide, tour, tickets

Las Ventas is Madrid’s bullring: a red-brick Neo-Mudéjar landmark on Calle de Alcalá, opened in 1931 and the largest bullring in Spain, with 23,798 seats and a 60-metre ring. You can tour the inside every day on the official Las Ventas Tour: €16 for a standard ticket, Bullfighting Museum included. This free audio guide lasts about 4 minutes and starts outside the Puerta Grande.

What the Las Ventas audio guide covers

Press play on the square in front of the Puerta Grande, right as you come up from the metro. It works whether you only want to see the building from outside or you are about to go in on the tour. There are 5 stops:

Las Ventas tour: opening hours and tickets

The inside of the bullring is open to visitors through Las Ventas Tour, the official visit, every day of the week. You go in through the Puerta Grande, opposite the metro exit, and the ticket office closes 1 hour before the tour does.

A ticket with the official audio guide costs €16; €13 for students, seniors and teenagers aged 13 to 18; and €7 for children aged 5 to 12 and visitors with disabilities. It covers the bullring, the Bullfighting Museum, a virtual-reality game in which you face a virtual bull, and an immersive room with videos and 360° headsets. Private guided tours and group visits are also available. You do not need to book ahead, but on weekends and public holidays it is worth buying online first.

What you see on the tour: ring, stands, chapel and infirmary

The self-guided visit takes 45 minutes to 1 hour, and the official audio guide comes in 11 languages, English and Spanish included; you hand it back at the end, in the museum. These are the stops, although the order can change because of maintenance work or events:

• The Puerta Grande, the horseshoe arch in the central tower. Every matador dreams of being carried out through it on the crowd’s shoulders.
• The terrace outside, with views over Madrid and a close look at the brick and tile work.
• The stands and the box: the tiers, divided into 10 sections around the ring.
• The ring itself, 60 metres across, where you walk on the sand, and the gates that open onto it: the bull pen gate, the gate the bull is taken out through, and the bullfighters’ gate.
• The bullfighters’ courtyard (patio de cuadrillas), where the teams wait before the paseíllo, the parade that opens every event.
• The infirmary, with 2 fully equipped operating theatres.
• The chapel, a small one, dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Virgin of La Paloma, patron saints of Mexico and Madrid.

Entropic Travel walks you through the building, its corridors and its entrances in 9 minutes:

The Bullfighting Museum

The Museo Taurino is inside the bullring, entered next to the bullfighters’ gate, and it opened in 1951. Tour tickets include it at the end of the route. It holds suits of lights once worn by Joselito, Belmonte, Marcial Lalanda and Bienvenida, parade capes, monteras, swords and banderillas, paintings, sculptures and a collection of old posters.

The building also has 3 cultural rooms, the Sala Antonio Bienvenida, the Sala Antoñete and the Sala Cossío, home to the José María de Cossío bullfighting library, where exhibitions and talks are held during the season.

History and architecture of Las Ventas

The bullring takes its name from the land it was built on, known as the Ventas del Espíritu Santo, in what is now the La Guindalera neighbourhood of the Salamanca district. It was designed by José Espeliú, who died before it was finished; Manuel Muñoz Monasterio completed it, and the first bullfight was held on 17 June 1931. With 23,798 seats it is the biggest bullring in Spain and the third largest in the world by capacity, after those the Monumental de México and the one in Valencia, Venezuela.

Its style is Neo-Mudéjar, which 19th-century Spain championed as a national style and which became the classic look of Spanish bullrings: exposed brick, horseshoe arches, brick latticework and hand-painted tiles. On the facade, glazed ceramics show the coats of arms of Spanish provinces. Since 1994 it has been protected as a Bien de Interés Cultural, in the historic-artistic monument category.

Around the outside stand statues of bullfighters linked to the ring, such as Antonio Bienvenida, Luis Miguel Dominguín and José Cubero, known as El Yiyo, plus a monument to Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin: before antibiotics, an infected horn wound was more dangerous to a bullfighter than the goring itself.

The season runs from March to October. Its main event is the San Isidro Fair in May and June, launched in 1947 by the impresario Livinio Stuyck, and the Autumn Fair closes the season. Las Ventas is a concert venue too: The Beatles played here on 2 July 1965. In 2018 the Madrid regional government began a €15.1 million refurbishment to bring the building up to current safety rules and use it as a multi-purpose venue.

From the air you get a real sense of its size, in the official tour video:

How to get to Las Ventas and what is nearby

The bullring is at Calle de Alcalá, 237. The easiest way there is the metro: Ventas station, on lines 2 and 5, comes out right opposite the Puerta Grande. Buses 12, 21, 38, 53, 106, 110 and 146 stop nearby. Most of the tour is accessible to wheelchair users, although the historic building means some areas have limited access, so it is worth asking beforehand. Allow 1 hour for the tour and another 15 minutes for the facade and the statues.

Las Ventas stands on the same street as the Puerta de Alcalá: take metro line 2, with no change, to Retiro and the gate is right there. It has its own audio guide:

Free audio guidePuerta de Alcalá, Madrid

One stop further, at Banco de España, you come out at Plaza de Cibeles:

Free audio guidePlaza de Cibeles, Madrid

All our Madrid audio guides are on the Madrid page.