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Philip II moved the Spanish court here in 1561 and left no document explaining why. The best account historians offer is unflattering to the city: Madrid had no cathedral chapter to argue with, no entrenched aristocracy, no power of its own. It was picked for being nobody. There is no navigable river and no obvious strategic advantage. Everything since, the palaces and ministries and museums, was installed on top of a town chosen because it would not push back.
The national collection, built from what Spanish monarchs bought rather than what a nation assembled, which is why the Velázquez and Goya holdings are unmatched and the coverage of everything else is uneven. It is a royal taste rendered public. The building was commissioned as a natural history cabinet before it ever held a painting.
The modern collection, and the home of Guernica since 1992. The painting only reached Spain in 1981, six years after Franco died, because Picasso's heirs argued about whether the new constitutional monarchy met his condition that democracy be restored first. It hung at the Prado behind bomb-proof glass before it came here.
The largest royal palace in Western Europe by floor area, built after the Habsburg Alcázar burned on Christmas Eve 1734 with over five hundred paintings inside it. The current royal family does not live here; it is used for state ceremony. The fire is why the building is baroque rather than medieval, and why so little of Habsburg Madrid survives.
The enclosed rectangular square of the Habsburg city, used for markets, bullfights, royal proclamations and public executions, including autos-da-fé. It has burned down and been rebuilt more than once. The uniformity you see is the result of reconstruction to a single design rather than of anything growing organically.
The city's central square and the point from which Spain's radial road network is measured. A stone slab in the pavement marks kilometre zero, and the six national roads that fan out across the country are numbered from here. It is also where the country watches the clock on New Year's Eve.
The former royal pleasure grounds, opened to the public in the nineteenth century, containing a boating lake and a building made almost entirely of glass. The Palacio de Cristal was built in 1887 to house Philippine plants for an exhibition, which is to say it was a colonial display case that outlived its purpose and became the nicest room in Madrid.
A genuine ancient Egyptian temple standing in a Madrid park. Egypt gave it to Spain after the Aswan High Dam threatened the site; it was dismantled stone by stone across 1969 and 1970, shipped, reassembled, and opened here in 1971. It is one of very few Egyptian temples anywhere outside Egypt standing in the open air.
Madrid's cathedral, and startlingly recent. The capital went centuries without one because the see was elsewhere, and construction here dragged across more than a hundred years before finishing in the late twentieth century. The interior is jarringly modern for a building that reads Gothic from outside, which is a fair summary of how it was built.
The early twentieth-century boulevard driven straight through the medieval street plan, demolishing more than a dozen streets to do it. It was a deliberate statement that Madrid intended to be a modern European capital. Look up: the skyline is American-influenced, and the Telefónica building was for a time the tallest in Europe.
A wrought-iron market hall of 1916, now a food court rather than a market. It is genuinely beautiful and genuinely no longer sells anyone their groceries. Locals will tell you to look at the ironwork and then eat somewhere else, which is advice worth taking.
Spain's capital was chosen for having no power of its own.
Philip II fixed the court at Madrid in 1561 and left no official explanation. The leading scholarly account is that Madrid lacked ties to any established non-royal power, unlike Toledo or Valladolid, which made it easy to govern from rather than valuable in itself.
The capital of a maritime empire has no usable river.
The Manzanares is small enough that Madrileños have joked about it for centuries. There was no strategic, economic or geographic case for the site, which is part of why the 1561 decision is still argued about.
There is a 2,000-year-old Egyptian temple in a Madrid park, and it was a thank-you gift.
The Temple of Debod was threatened by flooding from the Aswan High Dam. Egypt gave it to Spain, and it was taken apart stone by stone in 1969 and 1970, shipped, and reopened in Madrid in 1971.
Guernica stayed out of Spain for over forty years, and the painter's heirs kept it out even after Franco died.
Picasso's condition was that it not return until democracy was restored. Franco died in 1975, but the heirs disputed whether the new constitutional monarchy qualified, and the painting did not reach Madrid until 10 September 1981. It went first to the Prado, behind bomb-proof glass.
Every road in Spain is measured from one paving slab.
Kilometre zero is set into the pavement at the Puerta del Sol, and the six radial national highways take their distances from that point. The centre of Spain is, officially, a flagstone in a busy square.
Las Meninas survived because someone threw it out of a window.
The Alcázar burned on Christmas Eve 1734, taking more than five hundred paintings including works by Titian, Rubens, Bosch and Leonardo. Monks from a neighbouring convent cut canvases from their frames and flung them out of the windows. Velázquez's Las Meninas came out that way.
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