Madrid: history and heritage

About Madrid: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Madrid Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Madrid was made by a decision. In 1561 the court of a king whose empire stretched from the Netherlands to the Philippines settled in a modest Castilian town, and everything followed: the palaces, the squares, and the greatest royal art collection in the world. The city’s people have come ever since from every corner of Spain and, today, from across Latin America.

At a glance

Population: 3,416,771 in the city of Madrid (INE, 1 January 2024): the largest city in Spain and the second largest in the European Union.

Names through history: Mayrit (Arabic, ninth century), Magerit, Madrid.

A Castilian market town became the seat of an empire on which, it was said, the sun never set.

Shaped by: the emirs and caliphs of Córdoba, the crown of Castile from the 1080s, the Habsburgs (court from 1561), the Bourbons from 1700, and democratic Spain since the late 1970s.

UNESCO World Heritage: the Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a landscape of Arts and Sciences (2021).

Before Madrid

The plateau of Castile was home to Celtic and Iberian peoples, the Carpetani, before Rome made Hispania one of its richest provinces; the Visigoths followed in the fifth century, with their capital at Toledo, 70 kilometres south. Roman villas and Visigothic finds fill the National Archaeological Museum on Calle de Serrano.

Mayrit

In the ninth century the emirs of Córdoba built a fortress here, Mayrit, to guard the road to Toledo; a stretch of its wall survives below the Almudena Cathedral. Castile took the town in the 1080s, and for almost five hundred years Madrid was a market town with a royal hunting lodge.

The imperial court

In 1561 Philip II moved his court to Madrid, near the geographic centre of Spain. Under the Habsburgs the Plaza Mayor and the convents and palaces of the old town were built; when the Bourbons came to the throne in 1700, they brought French and Italian taste, the Royal Palace and the boulevards of the Paseo del Prado. Spain’s empire in the Americas sent silver, cacao and new foods to Europe, and shaped the language now spoken by some 500 million people.

The royal collections

The Spanish kings were among the greatest collectors in history: Titian for Charles V and Philip II, Rubens for Philip IV, and Velázquez and Goya at court. Their paintings fill the Prado, opened in 1819; the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofía, home of Picasso’s Guernica, complete Madrid’s “golden triangle” of art. The new Gallery of Royal Collections beside the palace shows tapestries, carriages and armour.

A city of incomers

Madrid has always been a city of people from elsewhere: Galicians, Asturians and Andalusians in the twentieth century and, today, large communities from Latin America, Romania, Morocco and China. Locals say that in Madrid nobody is a foreigner; its old saying calls it “the port of Spain”, a port without a sea.

Our advice: start at the Royal Palace, walk through the Plaza Mayor to the Puerta del Sol, then spend an afternoon in the Prado with Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Goya’s black paintings.

Sources

Population: Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), official population figures at 1 January 2024 (Royal Decree 1210/2024). History: Museo Nacional del Prado; Patrimonio Nacional; Museo Arqueológico Nacional; UNESCO World Heritage Centre (Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro); Madrid city tourism.

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