The Best Places to Drink in Spain

The house-made cherry jam in the Espresso Martini comes from a cooperative run by people with intellectual disabilities, which tells you a lot about how this cocktail bar operates. Moonlight Experimental Bar sits in Zaragoza's Casco Antiguo, where the team, led by Spain's 2024 World Class Competition winner, treats the bar as a platform for social projects as much as a place to drink something memorable.

The signature Espresso Martini swaps refined sugar for raw honey sourced from a small Guadalajara beekeeper, which is either a genuinely thoughtful choice or the most Spanish possible way to make a cocktail sound like a nature documentary. Either way, the drink is built around Ketel One macerated in rosemary and house coffee liqueur. This is a hotel cocktail bar inside the JW Marriott, polished and well-positioned, with Difford's Guide taking note.

The Espresso Martini here comes with a coffee foam, an egg yolk, and a cookie wafer sourced from a local convent whose proceeds go to people in need, which gives ordering a cocktail a quietly unusual moral weight. Santos y Desamparados is a bar in Madrid's Centro, the kind where a drink can arrive with a small story attached. The room pulls in locals who know where they are, geographically and otherwise.

Graffiti walls, mismatched furniture made from recycled odds and ends, and a cocktail menu where the drinks have names like Wasabi Wan Kanobi. Two Schmucks, tucked down a side street in El Raval, calls itself a five-star dive bar, which is both accurate and the best possible pitch. Ice-cold beers go out as fast as cocktails, and nobody is keeping score either way.

The azulejos tiles and carved wooden facade have been pulling people off the street in Las Letras since forever. Up front it reads like a classic Madrid taverna, wine and fino and all the rest; out back, Diego Cabrera of Salmón Gurú runs a cocktail bar that gives the old bones something to talk about. The crowd arrives for tapas and stays longer than planned, which is more or less the idea.

The Espresso Martini here gets the fat-washing treatment, with Ketel One infused with dark chocolate and a coffee liqueur steeped in orange peel, finished under a coconut and white chocolate foam. Zingara is a cocktail bar near Plaza de Salesas whose menu drifts between cultures by design, the name nodding to Romani nomadism. Difford's Guide lists it among bars worth knowing in Madrid.