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February 2021
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The Capital of Spain lies plumb in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula. To get to it, no matter from what point on the compass, you cross a vast, sierra-ribbed plateau whose forbidding severity is relieved only by the brief green of spring.
When I first visited Madrid, a raw twenty-one year-old, I arrived by rail. After the French border, it was a tortuous crawl down through the lush Basque country, then across the scorched steps to the capital. Dry riverbeds, hardly a deciduous tree (here only the ilex can eke out an existence), mud villages the color of the earth, always dominated by a crumbling church: I had never seen such desolation. Africa began in Spain (the old adage had got it right); Castile was a burnt sienna desert. I began to wonder why I hadn't stayed in Paris. In 1957 Madrid was a small-scale city of about two million inhabitants that you could cross on foot from east to west in an hour. I lodged with a poorly-off widow and her middle-aged son in the run-down quarter of Arguelles, which, they soon explained to me, had been badly battered during the civil war. The civil war? I knew nothing about it, except that it had ended in 1939, the year won by General Francisco Franco, who was still in power in 1957. Dona Maria and her son were taken aback by my ignorance. Didn't everybody know that Madrid had held out against the Fascists for three long years? Had I not heard about the bombings, about the mass executions after the war, about the awful shortage of food? And had I not noticed how many policemen there were around? Dona Maria lowered her voice. "There are lots of plainclothesmen and informers too. You never know who you are talking to." Madrid was infested with police, certainly. They were known as los grises, "the grays," from the color of their uniforms. Much taller than average Spanish males, they walked with an arrogant swagger. I saw people cower in their presence. Moreover, I began to notice the deference with which anyone sporting a piece of gold braid was treated in Madrid. I got the impression that the Madrilènes never stood up to authority, never complained. I became increasingly aware that many people lived in terror that the civil war had ended not almost two decades ago. I learned that Madrid had become the capital of Spain principally because it was conveniently near the Habsburg king Philip II's immense palace/monastery, the Escorial, which lies in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, thirty miles north of the city. We visited the gloomy pile, and were chilled by the long staircase that leads down to the circular pantheon where the Spanish kings lie stacked, row upon row. Obsessed as he was with erecting his monument to the nation's imperial grandeur, Philip refused to consider the advantages of Lisbon (Portugal was then united to Spain). And so a small town four hundred miles from the sea, cut off from Europe by a formidable array of mountain ranges, with not even a decent river to its credit, became the metropolis of the Spanish empire in 1561. By the time I made my way back to Ireland that autumn, I was speaking the language quite well, rolling my r's with gusto, and I had learned how to make an authentic Spanish omelette (the potatoes must be cut razor thin, Dona Maria insisted). Moreover, I had grown to like this city of the plains, with its seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor, its Retiro Park, its mix of narrow streets and elegant acacia-shaded boulevards, its thousands of ebullient bars and cafes, and its characteristic juxtaposition of the traditional and the new, the seedy and the fashionable. In 1978, three years after Franco's death, Madrid became my home for a period of time. With a massive immigration from the provinces, the city had doubled its population. Los grises had gone, and the transition to democracy, piloted by the Franco had named as his successor, Juan Carlos de Borbon, was almost complete. At his investiture in 1975, King Juan Carlos had sworn to uphold the principles and laws of the dictator's state. Despite this, he had immediately begun to collaborate wholeheartedly in the difficult dismantlement of the ancient regime. He had also refused to establish a court, much to the disappointment of the aristocracy, and he and his wife, Queen Sofia (sister of Constantine of Greece), maintained a simple lifestyle in their smaller palace, the Zarzuela, on the outskirts of the city. They were immensely popular, and still are. Today's Spain is a country. It is enjoying the most stable period of democracy it has ever known. For young people, Franco is now only a name, if even that. The people of Madrid have a saying, "De Madrid al cielo" ("After Madrid, heaven"). Cielo means both "sky" and "heaven," so the sense is that from Madrid, perceived as the supreme terrestrial paradise, the only possible move is a postmortem ascent to the celestial immensities above. There is a less well known second part to the tag: "Yun agujerito arriba para verlo" ("And a peephole for looking down"). Heaven without a daily glimpse of Madrid would not be heaven. Until recently Madrid's sky was famed for the limpid purity of its blue. Blue is the color of the Virgin, whom Spaniards revere, and perhaps Madrid's azure sky acted as a reassurance to those below that, terrible as it might be to have to abandon their beloved city, they would be well looked after. Nowadays, alas a nasty brown haze tends to hang over the car-choked city when there is no wind. The pall can be read as a sign of the changes that have been wrought on a city that, thirty-five years after Franco's death, houses more than six million people and which, as Madrilènes will tell you insistently, has lost part of its charm in the process. The upper reaches of the Castellana have been transformed into a miniature Manhattan, to be sure, and life is certainly more stressful than it used to be. But the city center retains its personality almost intact and, moreover, is enlivened today by the most dynamic art scene Madrid has ever experienced. Its epicenter is the Golden Triangle, at the southern end of the Castellana, so named because it encloses three great museums: the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and the Reina Sofia. If Madrid's greatest pride is the Prado, and increasingly the Golden Triangle, then it's probably the Madrilènes themselves who make the most lasting impression on the foreign visitor https://www.tripindicator.com/royal-palace-madrid.html
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