Madrid Rio Park: Spain's Capital City Gets Upgraded

Madrid, Spain was divided by two highways and a river until the ambitious Madrid Rio park unified it. Subscribe for more    / thedailyconversation   Shop my must-have camera equipment https://www.amazon.com/shop/tdc?ref_=... My recent tour of Barcelona:    • Inside Barcelona, Spain's Masterpiece on t...   Madrid Rio https://www.west8.com/projects/madrid... Madrid, Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid 0:00 Welcome to Madrid 0:32 Madrid Rio Park 1:00 The solution: bury the highways 1:55 An award winning design 2:04 El Retiro Park 2:37 Plaza Mayor 3:05 Puerta Del Sol 3:27 Celebrating the New Year 3:37 Charles III monument 3:56 Walkability of Madrid 4:08 Calle de Alcalá 4:18 Real Madrid celebrations 4:38 José de Salamanca 5:02 Christopher Columbus 5:39 Puerta De Alcala 5:50 Spain's Rail Hub 6:05 High Speed Rail (HSR) 6:16 Madrid Metro & public transit 6:43 Gran Via 6:57 Plaza de Espana (Cervantes' Don Quixote) 7:24 Plaza De Toros (Spain's Largest Bullring) 7:39 Royal Palace of Madrid 8:29 Museo Del Prado 8:44 ¡Hasta pronto, España! Madrid, the geographic and cultural center of Spain, sits at an average elevation of 650 meters, making it the second-highest capital in Europe. It is also the second-ranked metropolitan area in the EU by both population and GDP, after Paris, and often appears on top 10 lists of the world’s most liveable and important cities. With an average of 16 square meters of greenspace per person, every resident is within, at most, a 15-minute walk from a park. When in town, I was excited to explore one of its newest: Madrid Rio, an ambitious project that reinvented the only significant waterway here, the Manzanares River. Prior to its completion in 2015, the river was channeled and walled off on both sides by the M30 highway, creating a wide concrete deadzone that essentially divided the city in two. Even worse, another highway - the A-5 - blocked access to Casa de Campo, Madrid's largest park. To solve this, the city held a contest of ideas. The winning design reclaimed the banks of the Manzanares by burying the M-30 and the A-5 in 46 kilometers of tunnels, so the river could return to a more natural state, with its banks doubling as a habitat for animals and residents to enjoy. Today, ten years after its completion, this once depressing ten kilometre stretch is now an urban park, connecting the six districts it passes through to each other and the center of the capital just up the hill. Seven newly installed or repaired dams help regulate the flow while also serving as pedestrian bridges, and wooden boards and fish ladders allow aquatic life to move throughout the ecosystem. As a result, biodiversity has taken off, with birdlife especially improving. Herons and kingfishers are now a common sight. Madrid Río even received Harvard’s Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design, recognizing it as one of the world’s premiere public spaces. The other greenspace that blew me away is El Retiro on the other side of the city. Originally a 17th-century palace retreat for the Spanish monarchy. Today, Retiro spans 125 hectares of meticulously sculpted gardens, paths, pavilions, and ornamental ponds, like this one with bald cypress trees growing inside. On the sunny, cool day I was there, it was a peaceful scene, on the steps where the Palacio de Cristal meets the water’s edge. A short stroll west leads to Plaza Mayor, the city’s famous four-hundred year-old square. Its arcades and uniform façade contains 237 balconies for residences and galleries. Through the centuries it has witnessed market fairs, bullfights, and public ceremonies both joyous and terrifying, like the sentencing of 117 people charged with secret adherence to Judaism during the Spanish Inquisition.