Captain Alatriste: Madrid, Breda and Seville

In the first novel, two masked men pay Diego Alatriste and a fellow swordsman to kill a pair of unknown English visitors in Madrid. The tale echoes the visit of the Prince of Wales, who came to the city incognito in 1623. The English ambassador welcomed him here, at the sixteenth-century House of the Seven Chimneys. The building was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in 1995.

Visitor guidance: Look at the exterior from the street.

Madrid's main square is cited in the first chapter of Captain Alatriste. Purity of Blood recalls that two thirds of the city's seventy thousand inhabitants crowded in whenever there was a bullfight. The square measures 129 by 94 metres and is ringed by 237 balconies, from which people once watched markets, bullfights and executions.

Visitor guidance: Open public square, free to enter.

Alatriste survives in peacetime as a sword for hire in Madrid, and he lives in a rented room at a tavern known as the Turkish Tavern, with the young Íñigo Balboa. The Madrid tourist office places that tavern in the La Latina quarter, where it reopened as a grill house, La Taberna del Capitán Alatriste, in 1982.

Location precision: The tavern in the novel is not a surviving building; the pin marks the restaurant that takes its name from the captain.

Visitor guidance: A working restaurant in La Latina; booking ahead is sensible.

In the second book, Purity of Blood, the poet Quevedo asks Alatriste to help rescue a girl forced to enter a convent, and the Encarnación is the place where the acts of the Inquisition and Purity of Blood took place, according to the city's tourism office, which lists it on its Alatriste trail.

Location precision: The tourism office ties the convent to the book; the pin marks the Encarnación monastery that the city tourism office links to the book.

In the third book, Alatriste and Íñigo join the Spanish Army and fight Dutch rebels, in particular at the siege of Breda. The novel is set around that Eighty Years' War siege of 1624 to 1625, which passed the fortified city from the Dutch Republic to the Habsburg Netherlands. The general Spinola conquered Breda on 5 June 1625.

Location precision: The siege lines are not a single spot; the pin marks the city centre of Breda.

In The Sun over Breda, Íñigo provides details that Velázquez uses in The Surrender of Breda, also called The Lances, painted in 1634–1635. The Prado holds the canvas, and it is said that Captain Alatriste appears on the right of the painting, behind the horse. The scene shows the handing over of the key of Breda from the Dutch to the Spanish.

Visitor guidance: The Surrender of Breda hangs in the Museo del Prado.

In The King's Gold, set in Seville in 1626, Alatriste and Íñigo return to Spain from the Flanders War and become involved in an affair over a Spanish treasure fleet ship full of contraband gold, newly arrived from the Indies. Seville suits the story: it was the port and gateway to the Indies.

Location precision: No single building is tied to the plot here; the pin marks the centre of Seville.