Madrid & Toledo - Cities of Empire

In the heady days of Madrid’s movida movement of the 1980s, following Franco’s death, it was obvious that ‘Culture’ would play centre-stage in Spain’s new democracy; from Pedro Almodóvar’s avant garde film to the collections of the dusty Prado. Daring new projects with high capital risk like the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the Thyssen and the Prado extension demanded a rethink; rehangs at old established museums shaped the now spectacular Museo de Arqueología and San Fernando de Bellas Artes, while careful restoration transformed old monuments like Goya’s frescoes at San Antonio de la Florida. Banks and other institutions filled in any gaps with pioneering builds like Herzog de Meuron’s Caixaforum, the conversion of a power station with a 70 foot vertical garden wall by Patrick Blanc. As a result, Madrid’s art scene is now second to none. From Velazquez’s breathtaking Las Meninas to Picasso’s Guernica, from van der Weyden’s Deposition to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and through to its contemporary galleries, there is a common thread – the celebration of genius.

Madrid’s unique character feeds off the perennial tension between Spanish identity and cosmopolitan modernity, where gastro energy, tapas hopping, markets and designer fairs sit side by side with Golden Age houses. It was designated capital of Spain by Phillip II in 1561 and back then it was a dry, impossibly hot and boisterous wild west town in the summer, while in the winter the cold winds from the snow-topped sierra “couldn’t blow out a candle but could kill a man.” Madrid proudly boasted its status as a villa – a town, not a city - until King Felipe’s wedding in 2004 forced the consecration of the Almudena cathedral. It has had to constantly remake its history where rival Toledo is as old as the hills. 

En route, Phillip II’s imperious El Escorial was his haven from a Toledo he found too cold and the noise and bustle of nearby Madrid. Here masterpieces sit behind forbidding walls: a Cellini marble Christ – a gift of the Medici – rivals an illuminated manuscript as rare as Alfonso the Wise’s mythic Book of Chess. 

Toledo’s stone island has been cut by the Tagus out of hard granite rock. The skies with their bruised El Greco clouds sweep out across the meseta plain. The Imperial City, capital of the Visigoths, was home to the remarkable St Ildefonso, later the Arab taifa court, a School of Translators, synagogues and was invaded by the monastic orders. It is a warren of streets, where tolerance and the Inquisition faced-off  in an uneasy, sometimes violent, confrontation that sits right at the heart of the Spanish character and it’s rich, Quixotic diversity.  Masterpieces like El Greco’s Burial of the Count de Orgaz are seen in situ and gloriously on our own. There are few luxuries in life that beat it, except perhaps, as Quixote would tease Sancho Panza, a ‘pickled partridge’ married with a deep rich caldo of blood-red wine, followed by the sweetest marzipan heart – rolled out by a nun.