The Madrid Metro has this interesting thing called the “Pasaporte de los Museos de Metro de Madrid“, or roughly the Madrid Metro Museums Passport. It’s an little booklet where you can visit a selected eight out of the many Madrid Metro Museums and then get a prize for doing so. I decided to complete it in just two days while I was in Madrid, but I couldn’t find any information online about how it works, so I’m providing it all here.
Completing the passport
This is a pretty standard “visit X places and get a stamp for each” type activity. There are eight different locations that you need to visit to “complete” the passport. In no specific order, they are:
- Estación Museo de Chamberí (S, R)
- Look for a portal in the sidewalk that looks like an elevator, the entrance is there.
- Museo del Metro Nave de Motores de Pacífico (S, R)
- Museo Metro Chamartín (F, S, R)
- The museum is located on disused tracks inside the Metro part of Chamartin station. There are white signs throughout the station that guide to it.
- Vestíbulo de Pacífico (F, R)
- This one is located behind two very unsuspecting white doors on the Line 1 platform. Follow the white signs inside the station to get to it and pay attention to signs along the platform.
- Museo de Gran Vía (-2 Floor)
- It’s easiest to just take the station’s main elevator (which is hard to miss) to the -2 level.
- Vestíbulo de Tirso de Molina
- This is just one of the entrances of the station. All of the entrances of the station are pretty boring except for the correct one, so just try a different station entrance if things don’t look right. You’ll immediately be able to tell when you are in the right place.
- Yacimiento Paleontológico Metro Carpetana (F)
- This is located inside Carpetana station, follow the white signs to the area with yellow walls.
- Museo de los Caños del Peral de Ópera (R)
- This museum is just a dark room in the concourse of Opera station. White signs inside the station will lead you there.
(click each one for a Google Maps link)
This list of locations is given to you inside the passport, but the tricky part is understanding how to actually satisfy the requirement of “going” to each of them. Some important things to note:
- You can only acquire the passport at the locations indicated with S above. They will only give one passport per group of people, so if you want multiple passports (to get multiple prizes) you’ll need to act like you’re not together.
- Some of these places are located inside the fare-paid area of a station (i.e., behind the faregate line), denoted with F. This means you will need to pay a fare to access the location, so I would recommend doing all of them in one go or otherwise during a trip on Metro to avoid paying needless extra fares just to see each place.
- Some locations require a timed advance reservation to access. These are denoted with R above. In some cases, you need to book the reservation pretty far in advance because the capacity for each time slot is low. You can find all of the reservations on the Museos de Metro website. The Chamberi station guided tour offers a walk-up option, which worked for me for the first time slot of the day on a Friday.
- The hours vary for each location. Specificailly, Chamberi, Chamartin, Nave de Motores de Pacifico, and Museo de los Caños del Peral are only open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays with limited hours, so you will need to time the passport completion to align with this schedule. Vestibulo de Pacifico is only open on Saturdays.
Most of the stops are located along Line 1 and are fairly close to the city center, so it won’t take long to visit all of them. Also, most are pretty small and require anywhere from a maybe 30 seconds (Tirso de Molina) to 30-40 minutes (Chamartin). So I do think it is reasonable to complete the entire passport within a day or two, as long as that time overlaps with the opening hours of the locations I mentioned above.
Another complication to consider is that only some of the locations (marked S) can stamp the passports. At the other locations without an S above, you need to take a selfie clearly showing yourself at the location. Then, you can go to a location marked with S and show the selfie to receive the stamp. I think you technically are supposed to go inside all of them (i.e., book a reservation and visit during the limited opening hours), but I took a selfie outside the Museo de los Caños del Peral and Vestibulo de Pacifico and didn’t have issues getting stamps for those. This implies that you can visit the non-stamp locations even before picking up the physical passport, but it also means that one of the locations marked with S has to be your last stop before going to redeem the prize.
The prize
Once you’ve acquired all eight stamps in the passport, you can exchange the passport for a gift at any of the Tienda de Metro (Metro Shop) locations. There are three, each inside stations: at Opera, Sol, and Plaza de Castilla stations. The Opera location is by far the largest. The shops are all located inside the fare-paid station area. Therefore, I highly recommend going to a shop immediately after you visit your last location (a convenient combination for me was visiting the Museo de Chamartin, which is inside the fare-paid area of that station, then taking Line 1 one stop south to the Metro Shop at Plaza de Castilla).
Somehow no one on the internet has posted about what the prize is, so I’ll share that it’s a copy of the Metro 100 Years book. I believe this is about 55 EUR normally, so I’d say this is pretty good ROI for completing the passport 😊
