My £8 weekend in Madrid — a £1 hotel and £5 return flights

Free holidays. Who doesn’t love them?

Well, not exactly free, but pretty much.

Return flight to Madrid? £5. A fabulous stay Madrid editionthe only five-star hotel in town with a rooftop pool? £1 per night.

Car rental so you can go out historic cities like Toledo and Cuenca? £1 per day. This will do well!

So here I am, £6 later – actually, I’ll be staying three nights, so £8 – dining on a beautifully landscaped rooftop, under a rose-whipped jasmine arbor, a sangria chaser and the infinity-style pool overlooking the opera house right there.

Downstairs is my room – large, with a rococo headboard and white boucle sofa. Below that, the vast white-on-white bar and lounge, with its whimsical furniture and concrete pool table.

Then it’s down the sculptural stairs, gloomy with Instagrammers at the center of it Spainits bustling capital.

The Plaza Mayor is five minutes away (don’t miss the San Miguel food market, a tapas lover’s paradise), while the Palacio Real (the largest royal residence in Europe: Take it Buckingham Palace!), the Almudena Cathedral and (perhaps most importantly) the shopping area around Sol are all within walking distance.

Even the Prado, one of the most famous museums in the world, and the Reina Sofia museum, the best collections of world art we’ve ever been to, are just a walk away. And Retiro Park.

Party spots like Malasana and Chueca’s gay district are also walkable.

Basically, you are exactly where you need to be.

All you have to do – and this is the science part – is be careful with your Avios points.

You know Avios points, those things you get if you have one British Airways American Express or Barclaycard. Then do all your expenses through that.

I have a friend who has even thought about putting his mortgage on his card and, as a result, hasn’t paid for a British Airways flight in years.

Or you can use the Avios Shop, which filters you to say, John Lewis; when you buy something, freeze your points.

Or, spend at Pizza Express, book theater tickets through Today Tix or win them through Uber.

It’s the everyday expenses that can give you tremendous satisfaction in the end.

Because if you work those points like a pro, you too can be on my all Avios British Airways flight from London City Airport to Madrid (we have enough for Business Class so they’re already pouring the champagne!).

The idea behind British Airways’ all-Avios flights – celebrating their 50th anniversary with us, by the way – is to acknowledge the frustration of people with points burning holes in their pockets who sometimes find they can’t get the exact flight they want on popular routes such as Cape Town at christmas, Corfu, Barbados…

And while we do Madrid – rooftop bars (not as cool as ours!), restaurants like BLoved, which has that rare commodity in Spain: vegan food and a photo-only tour of the Palacio Real grounds – we’re all about throwing those drops in a car.

Of course, you can take the train (cheap and easy and actually quite pleasant), or you can drive just an hour outside of Madrid to the UNESCO Heritage city of Toledo, an ancient hilltop city once the most important in all of Spain.

We’ve got a wonderful guide, Adolfo, so we tour not only the churches, mosque-like synagogues and winding streets of this wonderful little town that’s mouth-watering with all the history eased into our ears, but we also have lunch at La Ermitaña overlooking the river.

It’s all we can do to keep our eyes on our watermelon salad, the view is so dead. Staff are annoyed at being asked to take pictures.

Our next trip is to Cuenca, famous for its hanging houses – Casas Colgadas – 16th century ‘skyscrapers’ which you can reach on a swinging bridge across a valley.

The old town is a fabulous mix of Spain’s only abstract art gallery – the building is almost as impressive as the art – and a cathedral too big for this small town.

That’s what happens when you make your fortune in wool production, you can afford to buy including ultra-modern windows in a suitably gothic cathedral.

There are also Michelin-starred restaurants, where the tasting menu courses keep coming.

And of course, the famous zipline – the longest urban zipline in Europe! – across the valley.

Unfortunately, we’ve had too many of those courses and we can’t really hack them when it comes to the crunch. Looks fun though.

If you have a rental car – you’ll soon get used to things on the other side of the road – you can go to Consuegra, where the famous windmills that Don Quixote fought against are still grinding wheat into flour on a hill.

Get some cheap olive oil and saffron or maybe take it to one of the indie festivals they host.

Oh, and don’t forget the castle where Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote – the most famous book in the Spanish language, in case you were wondering – once stayed and took in the same views across the orange fields of Castilla-La Mancha (where Manchego cheese comes from, so don’t miss it).

But that’s just us showing up.

If you look at the actual CCTV footage of our stay, a lot more is spent drinking cava-based sangria on Edition’s rooftop, ordering after-hours martinis at the bar, which is so glamorous we’re surprised they let us in, and eating late (so Spanish) at fancy restaurants.

We’ve saved money on our flights, hotels and car hire so we can afford them.

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