Bourbon Madrid: Cibeles to Atocha by the Prado and the Retiro: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Bourbon Madrid, from Cibeles to the Retiro
Madrid's Bourbon kings reshaped the meadow and royal park east of the old town: Charles III gave the Prado its fountains, a city gate, a museum building and a botanical garden, and the Retiro, once a royal park, filled up with a monument to Alfonso XII and exhibition halls of iron and glass.
The stops
Formally the Palacio de Comunicaciones, this white complex was built as Madrid's main post office and its telegraph and telephone headquarters, on about 30,000 square metres of what had been the old gardens of the Buen Retiro. Work began in 1907, and Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenie attended the opening on 14 March 1919, when it was called the Cathedral of Communications; while it was still going up, the people of Madrid had joked about it as Our Lady of Communications. Municipal offices of the City of Madrid began moving in during 2007, and it is now the city hall and the cultural centre CentroCentro.
Photo: Jorge Franganillo — CC BY 2.0 Ventura Rodríguez designed this neoclassical fountain in 1780, in white marble from Montesclaros, with the goddess carved by Francisco Gutiérrez and the lions by Roberto Michel. Cybele, a Phrygian earth and fertility deity, rides a chariot pulled by two lions that represent Atalanta and Hippomenes. It was moved to its present place and orientation in 1895, and it is where Real Madrid supporters gather to celebrate the team's trophies.
Photo: Naknaknak — CC0 Charles III commissioned Francesco Sabatini around 1774 to build a monumental gate through the city wall, replacing an older, smaller one, and it was inaugurated in 1778; the central plaque reads rege carolo iii anno mdcclxxviii. It was a gate of the former walls of Philip IV, and takes its name from the old path to Alcalá de Henares. Calle de Alcalá was a cañada real, a route for moving livestock, so flocks of sheep once regularly passed through the gate.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 In 1902 a national contest was held for a monument to Alfonso XII, at the initiative of the Queen Mother María Christina, and the architect José Grases Riera won with a colonnade beside a pond in the Retiro. He died in 1919 with work in progress, Teodoro Anasagasti took over without changing the design, and more than twenty sculptors worked on it. Paid for by a popular collection and inaugurated on 6 June 1922, it is 30 metres high and 86 metres long, with Mariano Benlliure's bronze equestrian statue of the king at its centre.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Retiro began as a royal hunting ground that was turned into a park for Philip IV's Buen Retiro Palace, and it has been open to the public since 1868. Ricardo Velázquez Bosco built this red-brick and tile hall in 1881 to 1883 for the National Exhibition of Mining, with the engineer Alberto Palacio and the ceramist Daniel Zuloaga, and it is the only building left of the pavilions put up for that exhibition. It reopened in June 2026 after renovation work and is used for temporary exhibitions of the Reina Sofía museum.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 Ricardo Velázquez Bosco's glass and iron conservatory, in the shape of a Greek cross, was built as a greenhouse for tropical plants from the Philippines at the Philippine Exposition of 1887. Its cast-iron frame was made in Bilbao, and it was designed so that it could be taken down and put up somewhere else, though it has stayed beside its lake. The cupola makes it more than 22 metres high.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Casón was the ballroom of Philip IV's Buen Retiro Palace in the 17th century, and with the Salón de Reinos it is all that remains of that palace. Luca Giordano's ceiling fresco The Allegory of the Golden Fleece, painted around 1694 for Charles II, is one of the reasons given for the building surviving when most of the palace was demolished in the 19th century. Picasso's Guernica hung here from 1981 to 1992, and the building is now part of the Prado, with its study centre and library.
Photo: Javier Perez Montes — CC BY-SA 4.0 Also called the Fountain of the Four Seasons, it stands at the centre of what was called the Salón del Prado and belongs with the Cibeles and Neptune fountains in the scheme Ventura Rodríguez designed for the avenue, part of Charles III's 18th-century reform of Madrid. Manuel Álvarez began it in 1780 and carved the allegorical figures of the seasons around its base. The Apollo on top has the features of Charles III, and the fountain was inaugurated in 1803 to celebrate the wedding of the heir, the future Ferdinand VII.
Photo: Harvey Barrison from Massapequa, NY, USA — CC BY-SA 2.0 Ventura Rodríguez designed this fountain and Juan Pascual de Mena carved its white Montesclaros marble, with sculpting starting in 1781. De Mena died in April 1784, and his disciples finished the work in October 1786. The crowned Roman god of the waters holds a trident in one hand and grips a sea snake with the other, and Atlético Madrid supporters gather here to celebrate their trophies.
Photo: Javier Perez Montes — CC BY-SA 4.0 Charles III ordered this building from Juan de Villanueva in 1785 to house a Natural History Cabinet, as part of a scheme to give Madrid a monumental urban space along the Paseo del Prado; the prado, or meadow, gave the avenue and later the museum its name. Work stopped when his reign ended and through the Peninsular War, and under his grandson Ferdinand VII it opened in November 1819 as a royal museum of paintings and sculpture. Its collection grew from the Spanish royal collection built up by Habsburg and Bourbon kings.
Photo: Américo Toledano — CC BY-SA 4.0 Ferdinand VI founded the garden in 1755 beside the Manzanares, and in 1774 Charles III ordered it moved to its present place on the Paseo del Prado, where it opened in 1781. Francesco Sabatini and Juan de Villanueva laid it out in three tiered terraces, and its job was to teach botany and to promote expeditions to find new plant species, with a special interest in Spain's colonial possessions. On the Plano de la Flor terrace stands the Villanueva Pavilion, built in 1781 as a greenhouse, beside a pond with a bust of Linnaeus.
Photo: Rubén Vique — CC BY 2.0 The street is named for the politician Claudio Moyano, author of the 1855 Law of Public Instruction, whose bronze statue stands at its foot. Booksellers, many of them dealing in old and second-hand books, have kept their stalls along the fence of the Botanical Garden since a permanent book fair opened here in 1925, with stalls designed by the architect Luis Bellido, and the council set a maximum of thirty of them. In 1774 Charles III founded a zoo on this ground, part of the Enlightenment project that also took in the Botanical Garden, the Natural History Cabinet, today the Prado, and the Royal Observatory.
Photo: La Citta Vita — CC BY-SA 2.0 Madrid's first railway station opened here on 9 February 1851. A fire destroyed much of it, and the new station, designed by Alberto de Palacio, a collaborator of Gustave Eiffel, was inaugurated in 1892; it takes the name Atocha from the nearby basilica of Our Lady of Atocha. The old building stopped serving as a terminal in 1992 and became a concourse around a covered tropical garden of about 4,000 square metres, and a memorial near the station honours the victims of the train bombings of 11 March 2004.
Photo: Håkan Svensson Xauxa — CC BY 3.0
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