Site of the 2006 airport bombing

A van bomb destroys the Terminal 4 car park

You're near Terminal 4 at Madrid-Barajas Airport, about 125 meters from where a van bomb exploded on December 30, 2006.

The blast tore through the parking structure and destroyed it. Two men died, both asleep in their cars nearby. Fifty-two others were hurt. The 2006 Madrid–Barajas Airport bombing was the work of ETA, the Basque separatist group, who claimed it in January 2007.

The attack broke a nine-month ceasefire. ETA insisted the truce still held, but the government ended peace talks. ETA declared the ceasefire over the following June.

Francisco VI Fernández de la Cueva y de la Cerda died at Hortaleza in 1757.

Pedro Temboury de la Muela died in Madrid in 2004.

Militias killed people at Hortaleza and Paracuellos

Farther from the airport, in the district of Hortaleza, the summer of 1936 brought mass killings as the Spanish Civil War broke out. Militias shot people accused of supporting the uprising against the Republic, among them Ricardo Gómez Rojí and a man recorded as Valencia II. Hortaleza was one of several places on Madrid's outskirts where such killings happened that year. An earlier death recorded at Hortaleza, that of the nobleman Francisco VI Fernández de la Cueva y de la Cerda, came nearly two centuries before, in 1757, and had nothing to do with the war.

Farther still, at Paracuellos de Jarama northeast of the airport, Republican militias carried out some of the worst mass killings of the war's early months in November and December 1936. Among those killed there were Julián Zarco-Bacas, executed that year, and Hernando Fitz-James Stuart, who held the title Duke of Peñaranda de Duero. Others killed at Paracuellos de Jarama that year included Justo Gil Pardo, Felipe Navarro y Ceballos-Escalera, Román Riaza, José María Acosta y Tovar, Juan Herrero Arroyo, Avelino Rodríguez Alonso, Román Touceda Fernández, and Álvaro Alcalá Galiano. The killings became known afterward simply by the name of the place, the Paracuellos massacres, one of the darkest episodes of Madrid's civil war.

Crews rebuilt the terminal and opened a metro station

Two civil guards called in the bomb warnings that morning in 2006, but the blast still caught the building by surprise. Rebuilding started three weeks later, on January 21, 2007. Crews repaired the broken terminal windows by the end of that month. The parking structure itself took six months to rebuild.

On May 3, 2007, workers opened the Aeropuerto T4 (Madrid Metro) metro station, built into the lower level of the terminal alongside the new building work. It let passengers reach T4 on Line 8, though anyone using a single ticket had to pay an extra fee to use it. A commuter rail station beside it did not open until September 2011.

A minister reopened the rebuilt parking garage

Spain's then minister of public works, Magdalena Álvarez, reopened the rebuilt parking garage on September 20, 2007. Businessmen attended the ceremony. So did families of the two men killed in the blast. The reconstruction had cost 24.5 million euros. Officials paid out another 15 million to cover the 2,100 cars that had been parked there when the bomb went off, along with damage to the terminal itself.

Courts convicted the bombers and four civil guards

Police arrested members of the ETA cell responsible in early 2008. The group, known as "commando Elurra," had planned the attack from meetings in Navarre the previous summer, under orders from ETA's then head of commandos, Miguel Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, known as Txeroki. He was caught in France in November 2008. A Spanish court sentenced him to prison in 2011. The cell members who carried out the bombing were convicted in May 2010.

A separate trial followed in San Sebastián in October 2010, this one over how two of the bombers, Igor Portu and Mattin Sarasola, had been treated after their arrest. Fifteen civil guards stood accused of torturing them. On December 30, 2010, four years to the day after the bombing, a court convicted four of the guards. Two got four years in prison, two got two years. It was the first time since 2001 that Spanish civil guards had been sentenced for torturing ETA suspects.

A Spanair jet crashed on takeoff nearby

Just north of where you're standing, on runway 36L, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 lost control on takeoff and crashed. It was Spanair Flight 5022 crash. Investigators found the crew had failed to set the plane's flaps and slats correctly before departure. Of the 172 people aboard, 154 died. It remains one of the deadliest air disasters in Spanish history, and it happened within sight of the terminal you're near.

The terminal now handles ordinary daily air traffic

Today, the terminal and its rebuilt parking garage handle the ordinary business of one of Europe's busiest airports. The metro station beneath it still charges the same supplement it did when it opened in 2007. Travelers move through the terminal with little sign of what happened here in 2006, beyond the memory held in the records of the attack and the trials that followed it.

Madrid's ground held settlers long before the airport

This is the older ground of Madrid. It belongs to the city, and the corner at this point comes later. The site of modern-day Madrid has been occupied since prehistoric times. There are archaeological remains of the Celtic Carpetani settlement, Roman villas, a Visigoth basilica near the church of Santa María de la Almudena and three Visigoth necropolises near Casa de Campo, Tetuán and Vicálvaro. In the second half of the 9th century, Umayyad Emir Muhammad I built a fortress on a headland near the river Manzanares as one of the many fortresses he ordered built on the border between Al-Andalus and the kingdoms of León and Castile, with the objective of protecting Toledo from Christian attacks from the North and as a starting point for Muslim offensives. In the context of the wider campaign for the conquest of the taifa of Toledo initiated in 1079, Madrid was seized in 1083 by Alfonso VI of León and Castile, who sought to use the town as an offensive outpost against the city of Toledo, in turn conquered in 1085.