Madrid: the back story

About Madrid: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Madrid Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Madrid is a young capital with an old heart. It began as a Moorish fortress above the Manzanares, became the seat of the Spanish court in 1561 and grew, street by street, into one of Europe’s great cities. You can still walk its story in an afternoon, from a stretch of ninth-century wall to the museums of the Paseo del Prado.

Mayrit

Madrid began as Mayrit, a fortress built in the ninth century by the emirs of Córdoba to watch the road to Toledo. A stretch of its wall still stands on the Cuesta de la Vega, just below the Almudena Cathedral, in the small park named after its founder, Emir Mohamed I. Historians link the name to the underground water channels the settlement depended on. Christian Castile took the town in the 1080s, and for almost five centuries it stayed a modest market town on the Castilian plateau.

The court arrives

Everything changed in 1561, when Philip II moved the royal court to Madrid. Apart from a few years in Valladolid at the start of the 1600s, it has stayed ever since. The new capital needed a stage, and in 1617–1619 the architect Juan Gómez de Mora gave it one: the Plaza Mayor, an arcaded square that hosted markets, bullfights, canonisations and royal celebrations. Walk through one of its nine arches today and you step straight into Habsburg Madrid.

Nine centuries in an afternoon: from the Moorish wall to the Paseo del Prado.

The Golden Age

Spain’s Golden Age of letters was written in a few streets of the Barrio de las Letras. Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Góngora were near neighbours, and their rivalries were famous. The first part of Don Quixote was printed in Madrid in 1605, at Juan de la Cuesta’s press on Calle de Atocha. Today Lope de Vega’s house is a museum on Calle de Cervantes, while Cervantes lies in the Convent of the Trinitarias on Calle de Lope de Vega: the streets were named long after both men died. At the royal court, Velázquez painted Las Meninas in 1656; it hangs in the Prado.

The Bourbon city

On Christmas Eve 1734 the old royal Alcázar burned down. In its place rose the Royal Palace, begun in 1738, with more than 3,000 rooms. Charles III, king from 1759 to 1788, is still remembered as Madrid’s best “mayor”: he gave the city street lighting, paving and drains, the Puerta de Alcalá (1778) and the Paseo del Prado, a boulevard of science with a botanic garden, an observatory and Juan de Villanueva’s natural-history cabinet. That building opened in 1819 as the Prado Museum.

On 2 May 1808 the people of Madrid rose against Napoleon’s troops. Goya painted the uprising and the executions that followed in two great canvases of 1814, The Second of May and The Third of May, both in the Prado. The date is still the holiday of the Community of Madrid.

Gran Vía and the Metro

In 1910 work began on the Gran Vía, a new avenue cut through old streets to link the west of the city with the elegant Salamanca district. Its banks, cinemas and the domed Metrópolis building gave Madrid a modern skyline. In 1919 the first Metro line opened, between Sol and Cuatro Caminos. In the 1920s the Residencia de Estudiantes, on a hill north of the centre, brought together three young students who would change Spanish art: Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel.

La Movida

With the return of democracy in the late 1970s, Madrid let its hair down. La Movida madrileña, a burst of punk and pop music, photography, fashion and film, filled the bars of Malasaña and launched Pedro Almodóvar, whose early films are a portrait of that joyful, colourful city. The late nights stayed: Madrid still dines at ten and goes out after midnight.

Madrid today

Spain’s largest city is now one of Europe’s most visited. In 2021 UNESCO inscribed the Paseo del Prado and the Retiro as “a landscape of Arts and Sciences”. The renovated Santiago Bernabéu now wears a steel skin and a retractable roof; Madrid Río has turned the banks of the Manzanares into a long riverside park; and in September 2026 Formula 1 came to the city, on the new Madring circuit beside IFEMA. The Spanish Grand Prix is due back there on 10–12 September 2027.

Legends

Madrileños are nicknamed gatos, cats. The best-loved story says a soldier scaled the Moorish wall like a cat during the siege of the 1080s and the name stuck to his descendants, and then to everyone born in the city. Another tale, repeated in almost every guidebook, has the young Goya washing dishes at Botín. It is a lovely legend, but there is no record to prove it; Botín’s own claim, recognised by Guinness World Records, is to be the oldest restaurant in the world still trading, founded in 1725.

Our advice: start at the Moorish wall on the Cuesta de la Vega, walk up past the Royal Palace to the Plaza Mayor, cross the Barrio de las Letras and finish on the Paseo del Prado. Nine centuries in an afternoon, with a stop for vermouth on the way.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Madrid: the back story before you go.