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Mamá Inés
A gay male meeting place with its low lights and low music, this café-bar is never sleazy and has a laid-back ambience by day and a romantic air by night. By day you can get breakfast, yummy pastries and all the gossip on where that night's hot spot will be.
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Melounge
On a quite street just back from the Paseo del Prado, Melounge is most often a colourful but cosy split-level little bar with an artsy vibe where mojitos , daquiris and piña coladas cost a reasonable around €5 . From time to time they also have small shows or exhibitions. It's always worth stopping by to see what's happening.
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Mushotoku Cafe
Tiny, black-walled and laid-back funky, Mushotoku is a mellow place to nurse your drink. On Fridays and Saturdays, a DJ spins minimalist techno tunes and although there's no real space to dance, this place is all about dancing on the inside.
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Sol Y Sombra
Sol y Sombra is one of the best live-music venues in Huertas, serving up a regular feast of live jazz, soul, R&B and sometimes flamenco. Drinks can be expensive, starting at around €8 , but the atmosphere is sophisticated and the music outstanding. Upcoming concerts are listed on the door outside and don't start until after midnight.
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Stop Madrid
This terrific old taberna is friendly, invariably packed with people and wins the vote of at least one Lonely Planet author for the best sangria in Madrid.
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Suite Café Club
A café-restaurant downstairs, a sleek dance floor upstairs, Suite Café Club is one of the trendiest places in central Madrid (which a single glance at the slickly dressed and mainly gay crowd will show), with DJs cooking up some seriously funky sounds.
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Sunrise
Sunrise is Chueca at its most outrageous with a mostly gay crowd on the prowl and often playing dress-ups. This place goes wild during the Orgullo Gay festivities .
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Susan Club
It's hard to know what sort of music you'll find at the cosy little Susan Club because the bar staff readily admit that they play whatever they feel like playing. As a general rule, it's quite funky and downtempo early in the night with more frenetic and popular tunes as the crowd starts to sweat.
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Taberna De Dolores
Old bottles and beer mugs line the shelves behind the bar at this Madrid institution, known for its blue-and-white tiled exterior and an older thirty-something crowd. You can get good house wine and some of Madrid's best beer for around €2.50 a pop.
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Teatro Joy Eslava
The only things guaranteed at this grand old Madrid dance club (housed in a 19th-century theatre) are a crowd and the fact that they'll be open (they claim to have opened every single day for the past 25 years). Expect the occasional famoso (celebrity) and international dance tunes that you'll recognise.
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Villa Rosa
The extraordinary tiled façade of this long-standing nightclub is a tourist attraction in itself. The music is what they call comercial , which basically means the latest hits with nothing too challenging. We include it here because after other places close around , you can't be too picky.
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Viva Madrid
The tiled façade of Viva Madrid is one of Madrid's most recognisable and is an essential landmark on the Huertas nightlife scene. It's packed to the rafters on weekends and you come here as much for some of the best mojitos in town as for the casual, always friendly atmosphere.
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Why Not?
Narrow and packed with bodies, gay-friendly Why Not? is the sort of place where nothing's left to the imagination (the gay and straight crowd who come here are pretty amorous) and it's full nearly every night of the week. Pop and top 40s music are the standard here, and the dancing crowd is mixed and is as serious about having a good time as they are about heavy petting.
