Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport to Puerta del Sol / City Centre

Stand in the middle of Puerta del Sol, look down, and you are quite literally at the centre of Spain — kilometre zero, the brass plaque in the pavement from which every road in the country is measured. I was born a short walk from here, and I still get a small thrill every time I step out of the metro into that half-moon of a square with its clock tower, its bear-and-strawberry-tree statue, and the churros steam drifting over from Calle Mayor. This is where you want to be based, and getting here from Barajas is easier than the guidebooks make it sound.

Why I nearly always wave down the flat-fare taxi

Here is the thing that took foreigners years to trust: Madrid has a fixed €33 fare from the airport to anywhere inside the M-30 ring road, and Puerta del Sol sits comfortably inside it. No meter drama, no watching the numbers climb in a traffic jam on the M-40, no "the tunnel was closed, señor" surprises. Thirty-three euros, luggage included, surcharges waived, and roughly half an hour later you are standing at your door. You grab it at the official rank right outside the terminals — never from a smiling stranger in arrivals offering you a lift.

For one traveller it is the fastest, calmest option going, and I will happily argue that at door-to-door value it is hard to beat. Split three or four ways with your companions, it becomes almost embarrassingly cheap, and you skip every staircase and transfer in the process.

The metro, and the small confession that comes with it

Now, I am a proud madrileño, and I love our metro — but I will be honest about it. From the airport you take Line 8 from the stations at T2 and T4, and it runs beautifully, every five minutes or so, all the way to Nuevos Ministerios. The catch is that Line 8 does not deliver you to Sol; you transfer there onto the L10 and then the L6 (or reshuffle onto L1) to reach the old-city heart. The whole thing is a flat €5, and that already includes the €3 airport supplement everyone grumbles about, so there is no maths to do at the machine.

The reason for my confession: there are a lot of stairs, and a good deal of platform-to-platform walking on that transfer. If you are travelling light with a rucksack, it is genuinely a joy and the €5 is money well kept. If you are hauling a hard-shell case up and down staircases while a rush-hour crowd flows around you, you may find yourself quietly wishing you had taken the taxi. Budget around three-quarters of an hour, more if you dawdle at the changes.

The night owl's friend: the 203 express bus

My soft spot on this list is the yellow Exprés Aeropuerto, line 203. It runs 24 hours a day — genuinely round the clock — every fifteen to twenty minutes, for the same flat €5, picking up at T1, T2 and T4. It does not stop at Sol itself; it terminates at Atocha, from where Puerta del Sol is a short metro hop or, if the evening is mild and you fancy stretching your legs, a pleasant walk up through the old streets. During the deepest hours of the night the service shifts and the N27 night bus takes over from Cibeles, so you are never truly stranded.

This is the option I press on anyone arriving on one of those brutal late flights when the metro has closed for the night. You watch the city wake up through the window, you pay next to nothing, and you arrive at Atocha — itself worth a look for its tropical-garden concourse — with plenty of Madrid still to come.

When a driver waiting, or your own wheels, makes sense

If the idea of joining a taxi rank when you're worn out fills you with dread, a private transfer through Welcome Pickups or a local firm lets you walk straight from arrivals to a waiting car, door-to-door, for roughly €40 to €60. It costs more than the flat-fare taxi — you are paying for the fixed price and the certainty — and for families or first-time visitors nervous about the language, I think that peace of mind justifies the premium.

As for hiring a car — Hertz, Avis, Europcar and Sixt all have desks in the terminals, from around €35 a day upward — I would gently talk you out of it for a city stay. Central parking is expensive and scarce, and the low-emission zone (the ZBE) turns the historic core into a maze of restrictions that will have you circling and fretting. Save the car for a day trip to Toledo or Segovia and let your feet, the metro and that trusty €33 taxi carry you around Sol. Trust a local: in this old city, you do not want to be looking for a parking space.