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Madrid started life in the 9th century AD as Mayrit, a Moorish fortress town on the banks of the river of the same name (meaning roughly “the source of the waters”) which today is known as the Rio Manzanares. The fact that Madrid’s origins are Muslim, and specifically that it was founded as a defensive measure against northern Christian raiders, provided the Spanish Empire with sufficient embarassment that imperial historians would later claim Roman origins. These claims have never been substantiated, however, and so Madrid stands out in southern Europe as a city that uniquely has nothing whatsoever to do with the Romans.
As a Moorish outpost, Mayrit withstood a couple centuries of Christian attacks, but in 1086 Alfonso VI of Castile conquered the town and converted the principal mosque into the Church of Santa Maria de la Almudena, on the same site where the Almudena cathedral stands today.
With its name now latinized to Magerit, Madrid spent its first few centuries under Christian rule as a relatively unimportant agricultural town, making modest gains over the years by being chosen as the headquarters of several religious orders, and by being incorporated into the main Castilian highway. The alcázar (meaning “fortress”) was converted into a palace by Enrique II in 1369, and his successors made their own additions to what was now a major—but by no means the principal—stopover for the royal court.
It was not until 1561, however, that Madrid became the permanent capital, under the reign of Felipe II. Until Felipe, the capital of Castile had been wherever the king happened to be at the time. Felipe’s father, Carlos I (also known as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) was, like many before him, a warrior-king, leading his troops in battle and constantly touring his dominions. But Felipe envisioned a very different management style for his own reign, trading in cannons and armor for a big desk from which could he could dispatch orders carried out by a royal bureaucracy spread out across the peninsula and his empire. Such a centralized form of government required a center, and geographically, Madrid was it. So, although it lacked a cathedral, a university, or a printing press, Madrid became capital. Its status was solidified by Felipe’s son Felipe III, who, after a brief flirtation with Vallodolid, declared that “Solo Madrid es Corte” (“Only Madrid is the Court”). Since then, even as governments have come and gone and regimes have toppled one after the other, Madrid has remained the (relatively) undisputed capital of Spain, even under Franco, who notoriously mistrusted the city’s leftist leanings (and who had spent the civil war launching bombs at the city under siege).
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True to its central location, Madrid experiences neither the balmy Mediterranean weather of Valencia and Andalucia nor the torrential downpours of Galicia and Pais Vasco. Madrid’s is a temperate high-desert climate, with an annual rain fall of 436mm and four distinct seasons. If you hit Madrid in July or August, you’ll find cloudless days with highs in the 30s (about 85-100°F). What you won’t find are any madrileños, since they will have all fled to la montaña or el mar (the mountains or the sea). With rainy winters that can border on freezing, Madrid is definitely best experienced in the autumn and spring, with plenty of sunshine and average highs between 15 and 25°C (about 60-80°F).
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At an altitude of 650m (2,150ft.) Madrid’s perch atop the Spanish meseta (high-desert plains), makes it Europe’s highest national capital. Bordered to the north and west by the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range, Madrid proper covers an area of about 600 square kilometers (375 square miles), and encompasses a population of 3.1 million people, with 2 million more in the suburbs. Madrid was founded on the banks of the Rio Manzanares, but since ancient days the river has been of relatively minor importance to madrileños, and the city has long since expanded well to the east of the river. As mentioned previously, Madrid is very nearly the country’s geographical center, and the independent
Comunidad de Madrid (“Community of Madrid”) is bordered by Castile-Leon and Castile-La Mancha.
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Conventional wisdom long ran that you bought ships in Bilbao, spices in Barcelona, and favors in Madrid—painting Bilbao as the capital of Spanish industry, Barcelona as that of trade, and Madrid as nothing more than a political backstop where licenses and permissions to do something productive elsewhere had to be procured. Since the Civil War however, Madrid has experienced a huge rise in immigration (first from the poorer arid agricultural regions of Spain, and now in recent decades more and more from other countries, mostly from Latin America, and a fair amount from Morocco and northern Africa), and Madrid is now the industrial leader in Spain as well as the home of the most multinational companies of any Spanish city.
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The palace intrigues of the Hapsburg monarchs and their court favorites would not look out of place in present-day Madrid, where politics are once again of primary importance to madrileños. After learning to keep their heads down and mouths shut during the Civil War (when right-wing sympathizers lived in fear of “Fifth Column” street gangs patrolling the city under siege) and during the long dark afternoon that was Franco’s dictatorship (during which dissidents were tortured in the Casa de Correos in the Puerta del Sol), madrileños have spent the last 30 years relearning how to assert themselves politically.
After dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, King Juan Carlos, grandson of the long-since exiled Alfonso XIII and Franco’s appointed successor, named a former bureaucrat under Franco, Alfonso Suárez, as prime minister. To the surprise of most (and the definite disappointment of some) Suárez initiated a program of widespread political reform, and a new democratically elected government set about writing a new constitution, which was approved in 1978.
The new government found itself presiding over a still very divided Spain, and the worst fears of many Spaniards were realized on February 23rd, 1981, when a Guardia Civil colonel stormed parliament and—firing shots into the air—declared a return to Franco’s regime. Many resisted the call, however, King Juan Carlos principally among him, and he is still credited by many as calming public fears through the night and keeping the armies in their barracks. By morning the attempted coup was over—the only reminder the bullets which are today still lodged in the parliament ceiling—and
crowds poured out on to the streets in support of democracy.
If anything, the attempted coup spelled an end for Suárez’s centrist UCD (Union of Centrist-Democrats) party and a political swing to the left. In November 1982, the PSOE (the Spanish Workers’ Socialist Party) won a landslide victory and continued in power until 1996, when widespread perception of corruption and ineptitude within the party ranks led to a victory by José María Aznar’s conservative PP (the People’s Party), which oversaw a period of economic growth and Spain’s continued integration into the European Union (which it had joined in 1986).
After being reelected easily in 2000, the PP was again expected to win handily in 2004, despite the fact that the government’s pro-Bush stance and involvement in the Iraq War were at odds with the feelings of the vast majority of the public. Then, on March 11, 2004, three days before the election, 10 bombs exploded on three commuter trains at Atocha Station in Madrid, killing more than 200 people and injuring 1,500 more. The PP party apparatus hastened to blame the attacks on the Basque separatist terrorist group ETA, even as ETA denied the attacks, and mounting evidence made it increasingly clear that the attack had been carried out by Muslim extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda. This overt political maneuvering, on top of the PP’s troop commitment in Iraq, was enough to mobilize a disgusted electorate who turned out in favor of José Luis Zapatero, bringing the PSOE back into power.
If the socialists have taken over nationally, however, the PP is still running things on the municipal and provincial levels in Madrid, although all is not cookies and sunshine: word on the street is that Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón and provincial President Esperanza Aguirre can’t stand one another.
Whatever their party affiliation, most madrileños are either tolerant or positively fawning over the Royal Family, who are model citizens compared to their better-known scandal-ridden British counterparts. In recent years, the city has come together for widespread rejoicing over a pair of royal events: the 2004 wedding of Crown Prince Felipe to commoner (and celebrity newscaster) Letizia Ortiz, and the 2005 birth of their daughter, Princess Leonor, who will one day be queen (assuming of course that Spanish politics will stay more stable over the next 50
years than they ever have in the entire history of Spain).
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Madrid is one of the world’s art capitals, and home to three top-class art collections: the Prado, based on the Spanish royal collection started by Felipe II is the home to the Spanish masters Goya and Velázquez as well as a multitude of lesser-known Spanish artists and a wide assortment of works by international artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Titian, and Dürer.
The Reina Sofía, most famous as the home of Picasso’s worth-seeing-in-person masterpiece Guernica, houses Spain’s national collection of modern art, and although some have criticized the relative paucity of international works, it is still a great place to get aquainted with the works of Spanish greats such as Juan Gris, Juan Miró and Salvador Dalí.
The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, more commonly referred to as simply “the Thyssen” (pronounced “TEE-sen”, at least in Spain) came to Spain in 1992. The private collection of the late Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a German Hungarian industrial magnate, it came to Spain amidst much international competition (Thyssen’s marriage to Carmen “Tita” Cervera, a former Miss Spain, probably didn’t hurt Spain’s chances of eventual victory). Housed in the Palacio de Villahermosa, a 19th-century palace renovated by top Spanish architect Rafael Moneo. As befitting its origins as a private collection, the Thyssen is less a thorough lesson in art history than it is in a deep exploration of the Baron’s favourite periods and movements. The modern British figurative painters (e.g. Lucian Freud) are particularly well-represented and Flemish master Jan Van Eyck’s diptych of the Annunciation is an oft-cited highlight. And even casual Dalí fans will recognize Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening, even if they don’t recognize the title.
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Madrid has changed much in the last few decades. Between 1950 and 1970 the population of greater Madrid doubled from 2 to 4 million, as hungry campesinos from the countryside flooded the city. The economic boom of the 1960s only added to the population increase. As the city filled up, space became more and more of a premium, and the 1990s saw widescale middle-class flight to suburban urbanizaciones, housing developments on the city outskirts or in neighboring towns ranging from modest to luxurious. Middle-class Madrid is fast becoming a commuter culture, with two working parents battling rush hour twice daily and well-allowanced teens spending their free time (and their parents' cash) at sprawling new centros comerciales (shopping malls) rather than at Parque Retiro. As the middle-class folk have left, immigrants have steadily replaced them, adopting once traditional barrios (neighborhoods) as their new homes. This is especially evident in the Lavapies and La Latina districts, where Chinese and Arabic can often be heard alongside every Spanish dialect imaginable.
As housing costs have skyrocketed, people have resisted leaving the home, and this lack of affordable housing, partnered with the more spacious family homes of suburbia and the slackening of traditional family discipline, has led many young madrileños to adopt what many have taken to calling "la Vida Buena"--whereas young people used to try to get out from under their parents' thumb and far away from their cramped living quarters as soon possible, many of todays twentysomethings are more than happy to live at home--coming and going as they please--and to take advantage of the pool and the housekeeper for as long as they can.
Madrid is changing in other ways as well. It is an increasingly tolerant city, and it is not at all rare to see same-sex couples strolling down the street, especially in the fashionable gay district of Chueca.
And Madrid--once famous across Europe as the home of the decade-long party known as La Movida--is still well known for its nightlife, although recent city governments have tried to sober things up a bit. Live music can be found generally according to region (jazz bars around Sol and Plaza Santa Ana, rock'n'roll in Malasaña) and all night clubs are easy-to-find during the week and downright hard to avoid on the weekends. |
Did somebody say Catholic? The Jews and the Muslims have long since been expelled, and Protestantism is widely-regarded in Spain as something that happens to other people, to such a degree that madrileños will often use the words "Catholic" and "Christian" interchangeably, when they talk about religion at all, which is increasingly rarely. Church attendance has fallen sharply since the days of Franco, and many associate the Church with the old regime. Still, 81% of Spaniards call themselves Catholics, if many fewer of these report regular church attendance.
Observant or not, however, the Catholic Church is still a very big part of life in Madrid, because holy feast days still set the calendar. Foreigners arriving on a Thursday are often confused to find all the stores closed in honor of a saint that no one much really seems to care about.
Nationwide, less than 2% of Spaniards name themselves followers of a faith other than Catholicism (following about 15% of agnostics and atheists). Of these up to 800,000 residents (many originally from other European nations or the U.S.) report being members of other Christian faiths. Estimates of Muslims are as high as 1 million, with about 60,000 Muslims living in Madrid. Nationwide, followers of Judaism only number 40-50,000, followed by about 9,000 Buddhists.
As the post-Franco immigration continues in Madrid, however, the religious map is changing, and the increase in Arabic immigrants suggests that the number of Muslims will rise. As important may be the far greater number of Latin Americans, many of whom practice a more devotional Catholic faith than their Continental counterparts.
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| Spanish is by far the most common language spoken, specifically Castilian Spanish, known as castellano in Spain. Other varieties of Spanish, from other Spanish regions or from Latin America are also common, and immigrant languages (mostly Arabic and Chinese) are increasingly so, although limited in use almost strictly to their immigrant populations.Traditionally, French has been a more popular language to study then English, and English-speaking travelers coming down to Madrid from northern Europe will be especially surprised by the relatively little English spoken here, although English education has been increasingly emphasized in the last couple of decades and as Spain has become more integrated into the EU and the global market, English has become less of a luxury and more of a necessity for many workers. |
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