The August thing nobody warns you about

If you arrive in August, you will think something has gone wrong. Your local bar has a handwritten sign on the shutter saying cerrado por vacaciones, volvemos el 1 de septiembre. The bakery is shut. The gym is shut. Your neighbours have vanished.

Nothing has gone wrong. This is just August.

What actually closes

Small independent businesses — bars, bakeries, hairdressers, dentists, the good restaurants — take two to four weeks. Big chains and anything touristic stays open. Museums stay open.

Why it is secretly the best month

• The centre empties of madrileños, so the parts of the city that are usually rammed become walkable.
• Veranos de la Villa runs all summer with cheap and free concerts and open-air cinema.
• The August verbenas — San Cayetano, San Lorenzo and La Paloma, from the 6th to the 15th — are the most genuinely old-Madrid thing that happens all year, and they happen in the emptiest fortnight.
• Terrace season is at full strength.

How to survive the heat

It hits 38–40°C and it is a dry heat that goes on all night. The move is not to fight it: shutters closed and out of the sun from 14:00 to 19:00, then live from 20:00 to 02:00 like everyone else.

Free air conditioning: the museums, the big libraries, El Corte Inglés, and the metro.

The city has refugios climáticos — designated cooled public spaces — listed by the Ayuntamiento during heat warnings. Worth knowing where the nearest one is.

The one practical thing

Buy anything you might need in the first week of August. By the 10th, your options are the supermarket and the Chinese-run corner shops, which stay open when nothing else does and which deserve far more credit than they get.