Three paintings that unlock the secrets of Madrid's dramatic past

Madrid is younger and perhaps less glamorous than many other European capitals, its winters harsh and summers torrid. But its high-altitude skies are a breathtaking blue and its palaces, parks, museums and churches are rich with story. Its cafes and bars thrum with conversation late into night. Join the crowds for tapas and beer that spill onto the street from the bars in lively Cava Baja, enjoy a long lunch in a plaza, or nestle into a booth in the city's oldest tavern, Taberna Antonio Sanchez, where a sketch of Sanchez, a bullfighter, by the great artist Ignacio Zuloaga, hangs in the front room by the head of one of Sanchez's bulls.

Madrid has a colourful history, too - and three iconic artworks offer keys to its fascinating past.

On Christmas Eve, 1734, a fire broke out in Madrid's gloomy old Alcazar palace. Servants battling the ferocious blaze only managed to save a few artworks from the priceless royal collection. Among the paintings the panicked servants ripped from their frames and flung to safety from the windows was Diego Velazquez's 1656 painting Las Meninas. (Scurrilous gossip suggests that the rulers of the new Bourbon dynasty started the fire themselves so that they could build the grander, newer palace that still stands today.)

Las Meninas, created during Spain's Golden Age, is today considered one of the nation's greatest cultural treasures and a highlight of Madrid's magnificent Prado Museum.

In the painting, Velazquez portrays himself gazing out from behind his easel in the Alcazar. In the foreground, a little princess, surrounded by her attendants, and accompanied by her kid brother, stares out as well. A man leaving by a lit door in the background also turns to look. The faces of the king and queen are reflected in a small mirror. Is Velazquez painting them? Or have the royal couple just arrived and caught everyone's attention? The painting's insightful portraiture and riddles of perspective have inspired generations of artists and thinkers from Picasso to Foucault.

The elaborately tailored costume with its dramatically wide skirt worn by the princess was sewn by the tailor Aguado. His talent elevated him to service in the palace. This was an honour in a city where most people relied on the court for their living, but where commoners and royals rarely met. museodelprado.es

The life of those commoners captivated another great, later Spanish artist. Francisco Goya is famous both for his dark depictions of human folly and the savagery of war, and his fond portrayals of the natural gaiety of Madrid's working-class majas and majos. The latter is the subject of Dance, which portrays a frolic by the Manzanares. The exaggeratedly nativist style of the revellers' dress cocked a snoot at the Francophilia of the upper class surrounding the French Bourbon kings.

Some fashion-forward nobility, like the Duchess of Alba, wore clothes inspired by the majas themselves. The duchess was one of Goya's patrons, the subject of some of his most famous portraits, and reputedly his lover as well.

The Dance on the Banks of the Manzanares, on display at the Prado, is a "cartoon", or oil sketch for a tapestry, commissioned for the royal family and realised at the Royal Tapestry Factory. You can tour the factory and observe artisans at work creating new tapestries using ancient methods - book ahead of time. realfabricadetapices.com

Madrid was a heartland of Republican resistance to the right-wing General Francisco Franco's "nationalist" coup in the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). The history of the Civil War and dictatorship is still so sensitive today that the otherwise excellent Museum of the History of Madrid, which begins its story with earliest settlement, ends it abruptly in the 1920s. I know Madrilenos who have never noticed a discreet monument, over the car park behind the Plaza Villa, to the Republican prisoners Franco dispatched to Nazi concentration camps. But there is no one who doesn't know Pablo Picasso's Guernica.

On permanent exhibition at the Reina Sofia, a former hospital that today serves as Spain's national museum of modern and contemporary art, Guernica is a huge monochrome painting of enormous power.

The writer travelled at her own expense