A friend and I stayed at Hostal Barrera for a last minute city break and arrived in Madrid rather clueless. Fortunately for us the staff at the hostel were very knowledgeable and helpful. The hostel is located close to the town centre and has good transport links at Atocha. The hostel included everything that I would expect (towels, toiletries, etc.)

I stayed here 7 nights and at €50 a night it was tremendous value for money.

The location was ideal for my tourist trip - close to Atocha station (for the airport bus and long distance trains), there is a Metro station nearby, Plaza Major is a 10 minute walk away, it is close to the three major art museums. (The Prado and Reina Sofia have free entry for 2 hours at the end of each day and I used this to go through the Prado collection over 4 days. That was a good way to see it – the collection is huge and looking at a bit each day kept it fresh.)

The room was newly renovated but with a small shower cubicle (not unexpected in European hotels). There is a free internet PC in the lobby. Breakfast is not available but there are plenty of inexpensive cafes/bars nearby.

The staff were exceptionally nice and helpful – one lady recommended places where I could try the local specialty cocido Madrileno (Madrid stew)

The only negative was noise from other guests one night – this was only an issue for one night out of the seven though.

There are also a couple of supermarkets along the road.

My wife and I booked Hostal Barrera for the last couple of nights in Madrid on a 2-week Spain trip because we liked the proximity to the Atocha train station as well as the museum district and lots of great dining. Everything was great and super clean. The hostal is located on the second floor and has a secure entrance. Our room had the most strong and reliable WiFi of anyplace we stayed on our trip, which was important to us for reviewing our flights information and checking email just before flying home. We also had a couple of extremely friendly and capable young ladies, Nieves and Michaela, helping us at the front desk and giving all sorts of good advice. As advertised, hair dryers were not in the rooms but easily borrowed as needed from the front desk. The biggest downsides were: No in-room refrigerator, and also our room overlooked Calle Atocha so we got some amount of traffic noise throughout the night which might bother light sleepers. Also worth knowing is that you are penalized for doing any laundry in the room, however the hotel's charges for their own laundry service seemed very reasonable. As it happened, we had ample clean clothes on hand to get us through our stay there and back to the U.S.

We would recommend this as a great hotel choice for visiting Madrid.

Very polite, attentive and friendly staff, super clean rooms, with enough space, good comfortable beds, several and international tv channels, like BBC, CNN and Vaughan system tv. Only air co not very powerful, but we have stayed in Oct, a week ago..
They provide towels, rather good shampoo & gel, something I did not expect.. and tooth brush and paste.. Modern and very tasteful decoration, loved so much the abstract drawings of "Don Quijote de la Mancha" on the first floor walls..