Madrid's royal park turned public garden

A royal retreat opens its gates to Madrid

This point lies inside the Parque del Buen Retiro, a park that began as a royal palace complex for Philip IV. Architect Alonso Carbonell built it as a secondary residence, a place for recreation outside Madrid's old walls.

The monarchy kept it private until 1868, when a revolution threw out Queen Isabella II and opened the grounds to ordinary Madrid residents.

About 190 feet away stands the Palacio de Velázquez, built in 1881 to 1883 for a mining exhibition.

Political killing in Madrid has a long history before the twentieth century. In 1650, Anthony Ascham was murdered in Madrid.

In 1823, Rafael del Riego was executed in Madrid.

In 1870, Juan Prim, 1st Marquis of los Castillejos was murdered in Madrid.

Marie Louise d'Orléans died in Madrid in 1689.

Maria Luisa of Savoy died in Madrid in 1714.

La Malinche died in 1551 in the Crown of Castile.

Exhibition palaces of glass and iron rise nearby

The Palacio de Velázquez went up between 1881 and 1883, built for a national mining exhibition. Engineer Alberto Palacio and ceramist Daniel Zuloaga worked alongside the architect, and the building now holds art exhibitions as a protected cultural landmark.

A few hundred feet from it, workers raised the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro in 1887. It was built almost entirely from glass and iron, with a brick base covered in ceramic tile, for an exhibition on the Philippines. Live plants shipped from the islands once filled it. Its iron frame was cast in Bilbao, and the whole structure was designed so it could be taken apart and rebuilt somewhere else. It never moved, and it still stands by its lake, now used for art shows.

A king on horseback overlooks the park's lake

In 1902, Spain held a contest to design a monument to King Alfonso XII, pushed forward by his mother, Queen Maria Christina of Austria. The architect José Grases Riera won it. He planned a long curved colonnade beside the park's lake, with bronze and marble sculptures surrounding a statue of the king on horseback.

Grases Riera died in 1919 before the work finished. Architect Teodoro Anasagasti took the project over and kept the original design. More than twenty sculptors worked on it over the years. The public paid for it through donations, and the finished Monument to Alfonso XII was unveiled on June 6, 1922. It stands 30 meters high and 86 meters long, right at the edge of the pond about 220 feet from this point.

In 1912, José Canalejas was murdered in Madrid.

In 1921, Eduardo Dato was murdered in Madrid.

A fountain honours Cuba beside a general's statue

In 1929, a fountain went up nearby crowned by a sculpture group honoring Cuba. The Monument to Cuba (Madrid) sits in the center of what is now the Plaza de Guatemala, around 370 feet from this spot. It shares that plaza with another monument from 1907, honoring General Arsenio Martínez Campos, the soldier whose coup brought back the Bourbon monarchy in 1874. His statue shows him on horseback too, part of a sculpted group by Mariano Benlliure.

A teenage writer is murdered in Madrid

Political killing reached into Madrid's streets more than once in the twentieth century, and some of it touched people whose names are tied to this city rather than this exact ground. In 1933, Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira was murdered in Madrid. She had been a writer and activist known across Spain while still a teenager, pushed hard by her own mother toward fame.

A politician's killing helps tip Spain into war

In 1936, as the Spanish Civil War broke out, José Calvo Sotelo, a conservative politician, was murdered in Madrid. José Calvo Sotelo's killing is often named as one of the sparks that tipped Spain into open war. That same year, Eduardo López Ochoa, an army general, was also murdered in Madrid. And José Estévez Carrera was murdered in the city in 1936 as well, part of the wave of political violence that swept the capital that summer.

A wartime fascist leader is murdered in Madrid

In 1959, Ante Pavelić, the wartime leader of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, was murdered in Madrid, where he had been living since fleeing after the war.

Labour lawyers are killed in the Atocha massacre

In 1977, Ángel Rodríguez Leal was murdered in Madrid during what became known as the 1977 Atocha massacre, an attack on labor lawyers connected to the Communist Party. The killings shook the city during Spain's fragile transition to democracy, just two years after Francisco Franco's death.

The park remembers the victims of train bombings

Terror reached directly into the park itself in 2004. On March 11 that year, bombs on four commuter trains killed 191 people across Madrid. A few hundred feet from this point stands the Forest of Remembrance, a memorial garden planted inside Retiro for the victims. It also honors a special forces officer who died days later, during the siege of the apartment where the bombers killed themselves rather than be taken.

A powerful banker is murdered in Madrid

In 2014, Emilio Botín, the longtime chairman of Banco Santander and one of Spain's most powerful bankers, was murdered in Madrid.

A duchess's mansion becomes a decorative arts museum

Away from the violence, the park's edge kept gathering culture. About a quarter mile from this point, the National Museum of Decorative Arts, Madrid settled into a nineteenth-century mansion on Montalbán Street in 1932, after decades as a smaller research institute on Sacramento Street. The Spanish state bought the building in 1941, and protected it as a cultural landmark in 1962. It now holds around 70,000 pieces across 62 rooms, built originally for the Duchess of Santoña.

Nearby, about a quarter mile off, the Salón de Reinos survived the Peninsular War's bombardment between 1808 and 1814, one of the only pieces of the old Buen Retiro Palace left standing. Built between 1630 and 1635 as part of the palace, it once displayed giant royal paintings, including scenes of the labors of Hercules by the painter Zurbarán, all now hanging in the Prado museum instead. From 1841 until 2010, the building served as Spain's Army Museum, before the military collection moved to Toledo.

The plaza carries the name of a distant nation

The plaza at this exact point carries the name Plaza de Honduras, one of several corners of the park dedicated to Latin American countries, alongside a Plaza Guatemala nearby. Madrid gave these quiet corners of its royal garden the names of nations an ocean away.

A hermitage stands half a mile from this ground

Ermita de San Pelayo y San Isidoro was built in 1101, about half a mile from this point. Church of Saint Jerome the Royal was built in 1464, about half a mile from this point. Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón was built in 1567, about three quarters of a mile from this point.

A frontier fortress gave rise to Madrid itself

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.