Madrid
Spain's capital, a high plateau city of grand boulevards
Madrid sits higher than any other major European capital, perched at some 660 metres on the dry tableland at the dead center of Spain. It is a city of broad ceremonial avenues, the vast royal palace, and the golden triangle of art museums — the Prado, the Reina Sofía, the Thyssen — wrapped around the green expanse of the Retiro park. With roughly 6.8 million people in its metropolitan area, it pulses late into the night, its plazas filling for dinner long after most of Europe has gone to bed.
The capital lies on the Meseta Central, the high inland plateau, beside the modest Manzanares River and within sight of the snow-capped Guadarrama mountains to the northwest. The altitude gives Madrid a continental climate of scorching summers and crisp, cold winters — extremes captured in the local saying about nine months of winter and three of hell. The dense historic core of Habsburg and Bourbon Madrid gives way to nineteenth-century grids and modern towers along the Paseo de la Castellana.
Madrid began as a Moorish fortress called Mayrit in the late ninth century, guarding the approaches to Toledo, and was taken by the Christians in the eleventh. It was a modest town until 1561, when Philip II moved his court here, choosing its central location as the seat of a global empire. Today Madrid is Spain's political and financial capital, the home of the monarchy and government, and a cultural powerhouse of art, football, and food drawing visitors from across the world.