The unofficial motto of the Spanish capital is customarily spoken, or sung, or sighed aloud, with notes of pride and pleasure. Sometimes, it can even sound like an incanted spell: “De Madrid Al Cielo,” or “From Madrid To The Sky.” This curious expression has been ringing in the streets for centuries, its usage dating all the way back through vintage ballads, movie titles, and promotional slogans, to the city’s literary quarter in the late Renaissance.
The Barrio de las Letras was then home to great poets and playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age. Titanic figures like Francisco de Quevedo, Miguel de Cervantes, and Lope de Vega were peers, rivals and neighbors, living close together near the comedy halls (corrals), where their work was performed. More than 400 years later, their presence is still felt across the district, between some of the city’s oldest taverns and newest cocktail bars.
Traditional castizo, taverns, and tapas bars draw generations of loyal clients in Madrid, including the renowned Los Caracoles, which first opened in 1942.
Photograph by Matthieu Paley
Today’s Teatro Español occupies a site used as a performance space since the Middle Ages, framed by the eternally lively terrazas of Plaza de Santa Ana. The house of Lope de Vega has been especially well restored and preserved as a museum. In its peaceful courtyard garden, an orange tree grows over the excavated roots of a tree first planted, perhaps, by de Vega himself, whose bones now rest in a tomb at the nearby Church of San Sebastian. His wonderful words, meanwhile, have been rendered in gleaming brass and hammered into the cobbles of main street Calle Huertas, where a pedestrian can also stop to read quotations from Don Quixote and other masterpieces of the period etched into the pavement.
De Vega’s friend, Luis Quiñones de Benavente, a former clergyman turned popular lyricist and satirist, has not been immortalized in the paving stones, but at least one of his verses has entered the abiding consciousness of Madrileños. Or the last line of it, anyway:
“Well, winter and summer
They are only good,
From the cradle to Madrid,
And from Madrid to the sky”
That last word might equally be “heaven”–cielo can mean either or both in Spanish–and the phrase is now broadly interpreted as meaning this metropolis offers something close to earthly paradise. Julio Soria-Lara, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, puts it this way: “For most Spanish people I think it means that if you want to make your dreams come true, Madrid is the place to do it.”
Developed over centuries, Madrid’s urban plan is considered a prime example of the “Mediterranean model” that makes use of sun and shadows to create liveable outdoor space.
Photograph by Matthieu Paley
This has been historically true in terms of opportunities, he says, but the layout of the city itself allows for people to live much of their lives outside, beneath that celestial blue sky. A southerner from Andalusia, Professor Soria-Lara has come to love the light in Madrid as much as anyone. “The sunshine is so beautiful here,” he admits, and while his adopted hometown is a long way from the sea, he’s also inclined to think of the contemporary city center as the most successful large-scale evolution of the classic “Mediterranean” model.
“From the beginning, even before urban planning was a discipline, Mediterranean cities like Madrid were designed to consider weather conditions and the experience of open spaces. If you look at the Barrio de las Letras, for example, the streets are carefully placed with respect to the sun and shadows, creating a nice environment for interaction.”
Like any major city, he adds, Madrid has been through tough transitional phases, especially in adapting to motor traffic. But its current profile, in his professional opinion, makes for a “modern, dynamic, international capital that at the same time still has local values.”
Those values are perhaps most clearly manifested in the sheer proliferation of green spaces and public squares. Each has its own distinct personality, from Plaza de Olavide with its orbital sweep of tall trees and tapas bars, to Plaza de la Paja, where the crowds gather every night in a steep-sided forum of grand facades. Flanking the urban center are former royal properties long since turned over to the general population–the repurposed palace gardens of El Retiro are now the pride and joy of every Madrileño, while the old royal hunting grounds of Casa de Campo enfold a vast expanse of wooded countryside within city limits.
Many of Madrid’s parks and gardens stand on royal grounds given over to the public, including El Buen Retiro and the green space outside the palace at Plaza de Oriente (pictured).
Photograph by Matthieu Paley
Deep inside this parkland, Cerro Garabitas is a hill at the heart of a local legend. A peculiar pre-dawn miasma gives rise to a misty, violet glow among the trees, and each point of light is said to represent the soul of a departing citizen, en route to heaven. Many locals may indeed have this folk myth in mind when they utter the prayerlike “De Madrid Al Cielo.”
Scholarship on the subject suggests this only became a truly popular saying in the reign of Charles III. The 18th-century Bourbon monarch is often credited as “the best mayor Madrid ever had” by virtue of his public works, from the city’s first sewage pipes and streetlights, to iconic landmarks such as the mighty city gate at Puerta de Alcalá, or the neoclassical fountains of Cibeles and Neptune, where fans of beloved Madrid football clubs Real and Atlético come to glory in their respective victories.
Charles III also commissioned a magnificent gallery of natural history, but didn’t live to see it completed, let alone become one of the world’s great treasure houses of art as the present Prado Museum. Inside, a visitor can see the definitive portrait of the king by court painter Francisco de Goya. Certain other Goya works on display serve as portals to the urban past–his tapestry sketches The Meadow of San Isidro and A Fair In Madrid showing civic life in Madrid’s burgeoning cityscape during the Age of Enlightenment.
The extensive art holdings of the Spanish monarchy have lately been expanded to the Galería de las Colecciones Reales, a monumental new museum placed between the Royal Palace, La Almudena Cathedral, and the ruins of the medieval city wall. Fragments of the original Islamic fortress on this site have even been absorbed into the museum collection, permanent reminders of Madrid’s oldest founding myth.
The story goes that a certain soldier in King Alfonso VI’s army of reconquest used his dagger to scale the sheer defensive wall–a phenomenal feat of agility that bestowed the nickname gato, or “cat”, upon everyone born here in the thousand years to follow. And that nickname suits the native character very well: Madrileños have instinctive catlike tendencies to stay out very late, and to survey their territory from a height.
Remains of the medieval Islamic fortress known as Mayrit are still visible at the so-called Arab Wall, below Madrid’s Royal Palace and adjoining Almudena Cathedral (pictured).
Photograph by Matthieu Paley
To view the best of this city by night, you must look to the rooflines, where Madrid’s most beautiful buildings are topped by bars and lounges on patios and parapets high above the streets. From the modernist city hall at Palacio Cibeles and the nearby Circulo de Bellas Artes (both designed by master architect Antonio Palacios), to the newly-opened roof terraces of luxury hotels in heritage buildings along the Gran Via, a visitor can always head upstairs and outdoors to join the living souls of Madrid enjoying their brief time on Earth—their voices floating over the lights and into the sky, towards whatever heaven lies beyond.
