Most cities of the world are located where they are because of some geographic feature such as the a place where rivers come together or where a river can be forded. Madrid is probably the only city that developed because of its geometric location. It is located near the geometric center of the the Iberian Peninsula. When Philip II acquired control of Portugal in addition to Spain he decided to locate his palace and the capital of his kingdom at its center. There was a town there already but it would never have grown to the multimillion people metropolis that it is today if Philip had not made it the capital of his kingdom. Portugal later gained its independence and Madrid was thus no longer at the center of the kingdom but it remained the capital of Spain.

Madrid's growth was certainly aided by its slubrious climate. It is located at an altitude of 2100 feet on a high plain called the Meseta. The winters can be windly and sharply cold in Madrid and the summers oppressively hot but it would be hard to find a more pleasant place to live in the spring and fall. The heaviest rain comes in October.

The Moors built a castle, called the Alcazar (from the Arabic for the palace-fortress), on a promotory overlooking the Manzanares River. A town developed outside the walls of Alcazar to serve the needs and the demands of the Moorish rulers. That town (medina in Arabic) formed the nucleus for the original city that became Madrid.

In 932 CE the army of the Christian king of León destroyed the walls of Alcazar. In 1083 the king of Castile and León, Alfonso VI, finally captured the town. In 1309 the Cortez Generales (court of advisors to the king) of Castile and León was convened in what became the city of Madrid.

The name for the city is not that of the foreign pronunciation of muh drid. Instead the local pronunciation is more like maw threeth or even maw three. This pronunciation indicates the connection with the original Moorish name of Majerit. This Moorish name stems from the term for mother or source of water which was a reference to the Manzanares River which passes the site. The suffix -it just meant place of so Majerit meant roughtly the place of the source of water, a natural name for a place upstream on a river.

It should be noted that the Manzanares River is not much of a river. It flows through the bottom of a wider channel that had to be spanned by a bridge. This stone bridge is decorated with statuary and is quite impressive. This disparity between the bridge and the river led the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega to suggest that Madrid should either sell the bridge or buy another river. Currently (2009) the city is developing the dry channel into a park.

The Toledo Gate Bridge
Madrid

The Development of Madrid from the 15th Century

An earthquake in 1466 damaged Alcazar and led to its replacement with a medieval castle. The Madrid area was noted for having many bears and the coat of arms of the city features a bear reared up on its hindlegs near a strawberry tree. Charles I often hunted in the vicinity of Madrid. The visits of royalty to Madrid led to a widening of its streets to accomodate the coaches of those royal visitors. This process of accomodation of the haphazard Madrid street plan to the needs of modern life continues to this day.

The widening of streets was not the only way in which the urban structure of Madrid was affected by the wishes and whims of the royalty. When Madrid was made the capital the king decreed that the home owners of the city must rent a level of their houses to visiting dignitaries. The Madrileños reacted to this imposition by building houses with only one level or houses that seemed to have only one level. Such houses were called casas a la malicia (spite houses).

Members of the royalty created public buildings and convents by demolishing existing housing and structures. After Napoleon Bonaparte made his brother Joseph king of Spain, Joseph had some of the convents torn down to create open space in the form of plazas and parks. This did not endear him to the ecclesiastical authorities.

Madrid has an impressive amount of open space in the form of parks, plazas and broad avenues due to factors other than Joseph Bonaparte's program. There is a broad avenue called the Paseo that forms the north-south axis of the city. The formal name of this paseo varies along its length being the Paseo de la Castellana over major portions of its length but Paseo del Prado in the vicinity of El Prado, the national art museum. (Prado means meadow and refers to the meadow that used to exist outside of the city walls.) There is another broad avenue that runs roughly east and west called Calle de Alcala east of the Paseo where it runs southwest to northeast and the Gran Via (Broadway) to the west of the Paseo where it runs from northwest to southeast. This east-west axis is not nearly as broad as the north-south Paseo. There is another broad avenue called the Calle de Atocha that runs from the northwest to the southeast where it intersects the Paseo near the train station, a truly magnificient structure.

There is generally a notable contrast in Madrid between the magnificence of its plazas and monumental structures on the one hand and the relatively narrow and chaotic city streets. The Madrileños, colloquially known as gatos (cats), seemed to be quite comfortable with the quaintnesses of Madrid. They love Madrid and the other anachronisms of Spain. When a guide at the National Palace in Madrid was asked where the King of Spain gets his income, the guide replied, "He gets it from me because I love him."

Spaniards have good reason to sincerely love King Juan Carlos. Generalissimo Francisco Franco tried to groom Juan Carlos to continue his repressive regime. When Franco died and Juan Carlos was made king he could have maintained authoritarian control but he did not. He opted to let Spain become a democracy with a modern economy. Juan Carlos had a close relationship with the Spanish military leaders and when the military carried out a coup d'etat in 1981 over the issue of regional autonomy he was able to prevent the military control from becoming permanent.

(To be continued.)