The Palacio de Cibeles in Madrid, the white former post office with its towers and spires, now the city hall.

AUDIO TOURS IN MADRID

A capital that owes its position to a signature, where other capitals have a river or a harbour. Philip II moved his court here in 1561 to a town that had little going for it, and Madrid has been inventing itself ever since. Eight walking routes take you through what came of that, from the square where power showed itself to the city to the neighbourhood that has always lived most tightly packed together.

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A Short History of Madrid

Period 1:

A capital by decision

Madrid became the capital of Spain because a king signed a paper. In 1561 Philip II moved his court to a town of some twenty thousand people, with no cathedral, no harbour and no great history behind it, and that was probably the point, because it sat in the middle of the peninsula and belonged to nobody in particular. The fortress that stood where the Royal Palace stands today became the heart of an empire that reached around the world.

Seventeenth-century view of the Alcázar of Madrid, the fortress that stood where the Royal Palace stands today.

Seventeenth-century view of the Real Alcázar de Madrid, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Period 2:

The city of the Habsburgs

Around the new court grew the Madrid of the Golden Age, a city of theatres, convents and taverns where Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Góngora lived within a few streets of one another and spent much of their time feuding. The Plaza Mayor was its stage, for proclamations and bullfights and for the ceremonies of the Inquisition, and the arcaded square still carries the shape it was given then.

Francisco Rizi's painting of the auto de fe held on the Plaza Mayor in 1683, with the square full of people.

Francisco Rizi, Auto de fe en la Plaza Mayor de Madrid, 1683, Museo Nacional del Prado, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Period 3:

The enlightened king

Charles III found a capital he considered unworthy of the name and set about rebuilding it, which earned him the nickname the best mayor of Madrid. He paved and lit the streets, laid out a boulevard with a botanical garden, an observatory and a cabinet of physics, and raised the gate that still marks the entrance to the Retiro. Science, nature and art out in the open and free for everyone was new in Europe.

Luis Paret y Alcázar's painting of the Puerta del Sol in 1773, with carriages and market stalls on the square.

Luis Paret y Alcázar, La Puerta del Sol en Madrid, 1773, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Period 4:

The second of May

On 2 May 1808, Madrid rose against the French troops occupying the city, after soldiers came to the palace to collect the last child of the royal family. Within an hour half the city was fighting with knives and stones against thirty thousand men, and by nightfall more than four hundred people were dead. Goya painted both that day and the executions that followed, and the uprising set off a war that lasted six years.

Francisco de Goya, El 2 de mayo de 1808 en Madrid o La lucha con los mamelucos, 1814, Museo Nacional del Prado, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Period 5:

The besieged city

In November 1936 the front line came to rest inside the city limits, which made Madrid the only European capital with trenches in its own park. For almost three years the city held out while shells fell on the streets and planes were sent against residential districts for the first time anywhere in the world. Correspondents filed their stories from a hotel on the Gran Vía, and the bar where they ended their nights is still open.

Children helping to build a barricade in a Madrid street in November 1936.

Mikhail Koltsov, children at the defensive works in Madrid, 4 November 1936, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Period 6:

The street that cut through

Fourteen streets disappeared and more than three hundred houses came down to make room for the Gran Vía, begun in 1910 and finished twenty years later in three stages you can still read in the facades. What came back was the first street in Spain to measure itself against New York, with a skyscraper that was the tallest in Europe outside the Soviet Union. The city has kept rebuilding itself the same way ever since.