THE unofficial motto of the Spanish capital is customarily spoken, or sung, or sighed aloud, with notes of pride or 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 useage dating all the way back through vintage pop ballads, and 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 all peers, rivals and neighbours, living close together near the “comedy corrals” where their work was often performed. More than 400 years later, their presence is still felt across that district, between some of the city’s oldest taverns and newest cocktail bars.
Today’s Teatro Español occupies a site used as 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 an ancestor first planted, perhaps, by de Vega himself, whose bones now repose in their tomb at the nearby Church of San Sebastian. His wonderful words, meanwhile, have been rendered into gleaming brass and hammered into the very cobbles of main street Calle Huertas, where a pedestrian can also stop to read select quotations from Don Quixote and other masterpieces of the period.
De Vega’s friend Luis Quiñones de Benavente, a former clergyman turned popular lyricist and satirist, has never been so immortalized on 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 saying this particular metropolis offers something close to earthly paradise. Julio Soria-Lara, a 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.”
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 centre 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 the 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 says, 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 still has local values at the same time.”
Those values are perhaps most manifest in 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 starry, steep-angled forum of grand facades. Flanking the urban centre are former royal properties long since turned over to the general population – the repurposed palace gardens of El Buen Retiro are now the pride and joy of every Madrileño, while the old regal hunting grounds of Casa de Campo enfold a vast expanse of wooded countryside within city limits.
Deep inside the latter parkland, Garabitas Hill is another focal point of local legend. A peculiar pre-dawn miasma gives rise to misty 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 a prayerlike “De Madrid Al Cielo.”
Scholarship on the subject suggests this only became truly popular saying in the reign of Charles III. That 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 prevailing landmarks like 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 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 that king by court painter Francisco de Goya, and certain other Goya works on display can also serve as portals to the urban past – his tapestry sketches The Meadow of San Isidro or A Fair In Madrid showing civic life in this 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, the 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 that sheer defensive wall – a resounding feat of agility that bestowed the nickname gato, or “cat”, upon everyone born here in the thousand years to follow. And that appellation suits the native character very well: Madrileños have instinctive catlike tendencies to stay out very late, and to survey their territory from a height.
To get the best of this town 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 de 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.
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