Is it normal for the travel editor to recommend a sex toy shop? Maybe not, but the guidebook, Un Grand Weekend à Madrid – French of course – gave me an alibi to go to La Belle Isabelle, and frankly, this was an experience.

Coming from Paris, where most sex toy shops are located at Pigalle and surrounded by a cheap and unappetizing atmosphere – I have never been tempted to drop in – this was differently elegant. A tiny boudoir with rose coloured wallpaper and yummy pictures of Dita von Teese, the pin-up who has made striptease an art. Not more than 15 square meters, but packed with sexy accessories – and people. Or, should I say, women. Because that is actually, what makes this shop so different. It is clearly designed to attract a female clientele, and is therefore less aggressive and more glamourous.

Here, eroticism is staged in small still-life arrangements with masks, silk corsets, long gloves, handcuffs (but tiny ones, I guess you can unlock them yourself, if he throws away the keys!) feathers and ultra-tiny strings with leopard-spots.

Of course, the shop also has a wide range of clitoris-ticklers, black bath-ducks with built-in vibrators and love-balls. Not to mention the stock of dildos. It was extensive, but without including the classic skin-coloured plastic-enlargements, the later being much too anatomic for La Belle Isabelle. Here the dildos are pink and turquoise, mint-green and golden; so aesthetically correct that they could appear in a coffee-table book showing Scandinavian design.

The little sex den is squeezed in between a sandwich bar and a vegetable shop in Corredera Alta de San Pablo 3, a narrow and popular shopping street in the old and picturesque Malasana district. And what is the most exceptional is that the clients enter and leave with out any hang-ups, as if they had just bought a cauliflower and two litres of milk.

While I was there, the shop was packed with women who were studying, touching, and smelling to find the right gear. A lady who looked like a diplomat’s wife with hair slides was discussing the functioning of a bright red silicone penis with the shop assistant. And another one, a tall woman who reminded me of a much sexier version of the gentle English teacher we had in high school, was buying a whole basket full of accessories, including a purple-coloured vibrator that was – of course – done up in rose tissue paper.

The only one seeming shy in here was a well-dressed man in his forties. He was the only man, and I never figured out what he was looking for. He waited for more than an hour, until everybody – including myself – had left the shop. So either he had some really naughty wishes, or he was simply, in the old-fashioned way, in love with the shop assistant.