ZEYNA© CREATIVE

The Spanish capital has always been better at keeping its secrets than its reputation suggests. For a city that talks as loudly as Madrid, it is remarkably good at the discreet, the understated, the things you only find if someone tells you where to look.

This is as true of its hotels as of anything else. While the flagship addresses — the Ritz, the Four Seasons, the Villa Magna — are as magnificent as their reputations suggest, the city’s most interesting accommodation tends to hide in smaller buildings, quieter streets, and the kinds of neighbourhoods where you can still hear the birds in the morning.

Hospes Palacio del Bailio, technically in Córdoba rather than Madrid, is mentioned here because its Madrid cousin, Hospes Madrid, operates on the same principle: a nineteenth-century palace, carefully converted, with none of the anonymous-hotel feeling that afflicts so many luxury properties. The rooms feel inhabited, in the best sense. The roof terrace has an improbable swimming pool.

In Malasaña, Casa Gracia functions as something between a boutique hotel and a private members’ club. The common areas — a library, a music room, a bar with wines chalked on the wall — are genuinely communal. You may end up having dinner with strangers who become friends. This is increasingly rare, and worth paying for.

And then there is Palacio de los Duques Gran Meliá, on the edge of the Ópera neighbourhood, where the architecture veers from fifteenth-century stonework to contemporary design by Lorenzo Castillo. The result should be incoherent. Somehow, it is not.