In 2021, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation) honoured Spain´s capital with its first World Heritage Site designation, elevating Madrid to the ranks of destinations with districts or monuments worth preserving for future generations (the larger Madrid community surrounding the capital already had UNESCO sites, including the royal sites of El Escorial and Aranjuez, which make marvelous day trips).

The city´s leafy Paseo del Prado boulevard, long a favorite of urban strollers, joins the nearby Buen Retiro Park and 90 other adjacent monuments and institutions to form the Landscape of Arts and Sciences, reflecting a true gem of urban planning: the unique mix of culture, learning, nature, and leisure that have been brought together in this beautiful corner of Madrid whose universal value UNESCO recognized.

Arts and sciences being the light that guides our entire civilization, this corridor has also been dubbed the Landscape of Light, doubly appropriate for its allusion both to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, a period during which many of its key elements were built, and to the intense luminosity of our Madrid skies, born of our clear dry air and setting high on the Meseta Central plateau near the Guadarrama Mountains.

The district includes some of the city’s most iconic landmarks and cultural institution, including the Puerta de Alcalá (pictured here), one of the remnants of the walls which surrounded the city between 1625 and 1868. 

Read more in my post Landscape of Light: Celebrating the City of Madrid´s First UNESCO World Heritage Site.

José Balido