Madrid is an imperial city, built by royal decree when the
old capital of Toledo, defensive atop a hill and wrapped on three sides by the
Tagus river, was found too polyglot, too constricted, too linked to the
centuries old Moorish presence on the peninsula.
So, from the mid 16th Century, when Phillip II
moved his court here, it was to Madrid that the riches of empire returned.
Following the conquest of the New World the city was paved in grand boulevards
and palaces of grey stone. Some tiny fraction of all the gold and silver that
must have been melted down and sold to pay for war and colonial expansion
remains. Jewellery and sculpture behind the thick glass of the Museo de America. Trinkets really, compared
to the loot that was taken.
These days the city bustles. My street, the Grand Via, runs
six lanes deep in a never-ending shuffle of cars and buses. At its eastern edge
are the cluster of former palaces – now museums - of which the Prado, with its
endlessly multiplying rooms of oil paintings and sculptures, is only the best
known.
Heading west. One block north of the Retiro, the ribbon-like
park inaugurated by the same Phillip II who moved his court here. Past
department stores, El Museo Jamon, a local food chain. Coffee shops,
clothing stores, the kerb side boxes of the lottery sellers.
Just before the urban development gives way to
parkways and flyovers are two buildings, staring at each other across the road
from windows cut in granite. Fascist architecture really – bronze eagles and
stone sculptures of a woman with broad shoulders and strong thighs. The
left-hand building belongs to the Spanish Air Force, the Ejercito del Aire,
and just above the letters announcing this is a smaller plaque dedicated to
Francisco Franco, Caudillo of Spain, 1954.