The glass and cast iron pavilion by the lake went up in four months and was meant to be a greenhouse. It opened in 1887 as one of the two main buildings of the , the colonial exhibition where Spain showed off its possessions in Asia to its own public. Inside stood tropical plants from the archipelago.
Outside stood people. On the grounds right next door, a village had been recreated with huts from the Philippines, where around forty people, mostly from the island of Luzon, were put on display for months to the Madrid public. They were made to dance, to work tobacco and to demonstrate their crafts, with exotic animals added for effect, from summer well into autumn. Filipino students in Madrid protested against it openly at the time.
The building is still here, and now it's an exhibition space of the , the national museum of modern art. Inside it's empty, with only the light falling through the glass, while what happened beside it in 1887 was left out of the story for a long time.
We follow the path south, until we reach .
Sources. Story: Wikipedia, Exposición General de las Islas Filipinas (1887) and Palacio de Cristal del Retiro; María Teresa Sánchez Avendaño, Análisis histórico y sociológico de la Exposición de Filipinas en la España finisecular, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Photos: Photo of the Palacio de Cristal: Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
