History

New Year’s Eve Portrait of the Oldest Bakery in Madrid

Just around the corner from Sol, Antigua Pastelería El Pozo, on Calle Pozo, has been serving traditional pastries since 1830. The very frills bakery has kept its original frilly decor this whole time and the pastry chefs continue to use artisanal techniques.

Photographs of Valencia’s two historic floods: 1957 vs 2024

Going through the archives of Valencia's 1957 DANA, I realised I'd taken hauntingly similar photos just last week in Paiporta, so I decided to make direct comparisons by placing the images next to each other. What this compilation demonstrates is that the same mistakes have been made twice. Predatory urban planning ignoring the limits of our planet, combined with institutional incompetence has led to the destruction of thousands of lives, again.

Explore 250 of Madrid’s metro stations with this artist’s intricate drawings

The layout of stations directly impacts people's mobility. Some cities have taken intermodality (the desire to make using more than one mode of transport during a single journey as easy as possible) as a serious issue, while others have not given importance. Albert explains that there are several key aspects to ensure quality to the transfers: "distance, the lack of architectural barriers, timetable coordination and a good wayfinding system, among others."

Portrait of Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden workers

The Royal Botanical Gardens in Madrid turned 278 this year, and has become a living museum with over 5,500 living species. Since its founding, it's also been a centre for scientific research with a vast library of over a million flora samples which are constantly being exchanged with other research centres across the globe.

Madrid’s ‘killer’ tornado of 1886

On Wednesday May 12, 1886, according to several reports at the time, the whole of Spain woke up to strong storms. By 6pm that same day, a tornado touched down in the capital and began a diagonal line of destruction between the then-town of Carabanchel and Madrid’s city-centre Retiro Park.

The giant Retiro Park monument to Colombus that (fortunately) never was

Paris has the Eiffel Tower; New York has the Statue of Liberty. But Madrid almost had this: a 200-meter-high globe in the middle of Retiro Park. This “Monumento a Colón” was designed before 1892 to commemorate 400 years since Columbus landed in the Americas, and to attempt to justify the Spanish Empire at a time when it was crumbling.

Unforgotten Spain: An intact concentration camp has finally been put back on the map

A tin of sardines from 1938 has just been unearthed. It's so perfectly preserved that we can still see its original pink paint and decorative lettering, reading, ‘Sardinas en Aceite puro de oliva español (Sardines in pure Spanish olive oil). “It’s one of our best finds,” explains Luís Antonio Ruíz Casero, the leading archaeologist from CSIC out of a team of eight, who have been excavating the site for three weeks.

Three of Madrid’s football stadiums were once Francoist concentration camps

Eighty-three years ago to the month, in 1939, the old Vallecas Stadium was converted into a Francoist concentration camp. In the first four days of April, which were also the first days of a dictatorship that would last 36 years, Franco’s troops crammed around 9,500 people into the old football stadium in Puente de Vallecas.

“We were never conquered”: Mexico’s Indigenous Zapatista movement visits Madrid

Just after sunset on 13 August 2021, with temperatures still topping 35C, the seven delegates of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) stepped onto the monument in Madrid’s Plaza de Colón. They had just completed a historic journey from the jungles of Chiapas in Mexico to the Spanish capital to mark 500 years since the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital Technoctitlán, now Mexico City. A local crowd, who marched behind the delegates, marked their arrival with thunderous applause.

When Franco bombed Madrid with bread

Eighty-three years ago to the week, in 1938, Franco began bombing Madrid with bread whiter than anyone had seen before. A report in the newspaper Diario de Cadiz published at the time read...