Real Madrid

Madrid is having a makeover. The Pharaoh - as Madrid's visionary mayor is being called - is at work. Buildings are cloaked in screens, monuments shrouded in scaffolding. Streets have been dug up and routes diverted.

'Madrid is currently undertaking the greatest process of urban transformation in its history and one of the most ambitious in Europe,' boasted Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon, mayor of Madrid, to reporters recently. Bear with me, he implores the grumbling Madrilenos - disturbed, dust-caked and detoured - it'll be all right on the night.

He's not the only one with bright new ideas. Alongside this official reinvention a design revolution is invigorating Madrid, as Spain's capital marks itself out with some

of Europe's most boldly stylish buildings and dazzling interior design. Fed up with looking a frump beside uber-chic Barcelona, Madrid is creating the post-modern sights to match its post-Franco liberation.

The Airport It begins as soon as you land at Barajas Airport. A freakishly long ribbed-steel warehouse glints in the sun. The plane taxis towards it; it must be the terminal. Once inside, all industrial impressions vanish as you stand in awe at an arrivals hall resembling a vast sculpture. An endless parade of angled red pylons soars up to a great wave-form roof coated with wooden slats, undulating into an impossibly far distance, counterpointed at floor level by shimmering steel travelators running to vanishing point. It is a mesmerising ensemble. You have to drag yourself away to passport control for fear of arrest for suspicious behaviour. When able to think, you twig that the colour scheme is a cool take on the Spanish national colours: primary red and yellow.

This stunner is T4, the new pride of Madrid, which - added to the three older terminals - has given Barajas the title of world's biggest airport by terminal area: about a square kilometre in total.