In 1570 had trees planted here, and that is where everything around you begins. Back then this was the eastern edge of the city, a stretch of meadow beside the , and the name of that meadow, el prado, still lives on in the boulevard and in .
Two hundred years later it was turned into a salon, because the plan drawn up for gave this strip the shape of a Roman racecourse, with the three fountains as anchor points and rows of trees along the sides, and the people of Madrid came to stroll here the way you walk from room to room inside a building. They called it the Salón del Prado, and on warm evenings it was packed.
That habit of strolling never really left, because what you hear around you now is a wide traffic artery, and yet people still walk along the central median as if it were a hall.
We follow the median until we reach .
Sources. Story: Hispanopedia, Paseo del Prado; Pedro Teixeira, Topographia de la Villa de Madrid, 1656, Biblioteca Nacional de España. Photos: Francisco Domingo Marqués, La puerta del Jardín Botánico desde el Museo del Prado, 1870, CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
