ZEYNA© CREATIVE

Every April, Madrid transforms into something close to an art city-state. ARCO fills the halls of IFEMA with 200 galleries and roughly 100,000 visitors. But the real action, increasingly, happens in the margins: the off-fair shows, the gallery openings, the after-parties where collectors and critics trade whispered opinions over natural wine.

Our advice: treat ARCO as your anchor, not your destination. Arrive on the opening day if you have a professional accreditation — the first hours, when the halls are quieter and dealers are still arranging their stands, are when the best conversations happen. After that, let the fair recede and follow the map below.

Galería Elvira González (Jorge Juan) is showing a new body of work by Cristina de Miguel that uses cyanotype and steel mesh to render satellite imagery of conflict zones. It is rigorous and quietly devastating. Don’t miss it.

Travesía Cuatro has brought together three Mexican painters — Pia Camil, Rodrigo Hernández and Tania Pérez Córdova — in a group show about labour, material and the politics of craft. The colours alone make it worth the walk from Alonso Martínez.

In the evening, the Círculo de Bellas Artes hosts its annual ARCO dinner, which is as much a social event as an artistic one. Get there before 22:00 if you want to eat. After midnight, the conversations move to Taberna del Alabardero and, eventually, to wherever the after-party is — this year’s location is, as always, a secret until the last moment.

Art Week ends on Sunday, but the hangovers, and the discoveries, tend to last longer.