Madrid: The History by Jules Stewart

Author:Jules Stewart [Stewart, Jules]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spain, General, Architecture, Literary Studies, Social and Cultural History, Travel, European history, Travel and Holiday, Europe, History of Art, History, Spain & Portugal
ISBN: 9781780762814
Google: TQbQo7lraQoC
Amazon: B00D5RGQWG
Goodreads: 15794269
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Aranjuez line was dubbed ‘el Tren de la Fresa’ (‘the Strawberry Train’), as a result of Aranjuez’s famous April strawberry harvest, something that was to have an impact on transporting goods and people to and from the capital. ‘This new mode of transport even influenced Madrileños’ diet, by gradually bringing fresh food to the city as a substitution for salted produce.’20

Why the first railway line from Madrid was laid between the capital and this relatively insignificant royal resort, and not between Madrid and Toledo or Valladolid, for instance, could perhaps be explained by an analogy with the country’s first long-distance, high-speed train (Alta Velocidad Española, AVE), which entered into service between Madrid and Sevilla in 1992. The more logical link in terms of passenger and cargo volume would have been Barcelona, or France via Irún. In other words, if travellers can get from Madrid to Sevilla in two and a half hours, does it make sense to have to spend up to six hours on a train from Madrid to Barcelona? As the socialist PSOE prime minister Felipe González confided unofficially at the time, if the government had done the ‘logical’ thing, they would have faced great difficulties raising the funds and political support for extending the network to less heavily trafficked destinations, such as Sevilla.

On a February morning in 1851, the streets around Atocha station were clogged with more than a thousand spectators, Madrileños as well as people from surrounding villages who had come to the capital to catch a glimpse of the smoke-belching monster pulling its load of distinguished passengers on the 75-minute journey south to Aranjuez. A great fête had been organised and paid for by the financier José de Salamanca, Marqués de Salamanca, one of the founders in 1847 of the operating company Sociedad del Ferrocarril de Madrid a Aranjuez, a venture-capital firm set up with 45 million reales in equity and which, three months after the first train departed Atocha station, was making a profit of 50,000 reales a day. The Archbishop of Toledo was on hand that morning to bless the garlanded locomotive, which was welcomed by an equally ecstatic crowd as it chugged up to the station that had been built for it at Aranjuez’s royal palace. Thirteen years later, in 1864, the first direct train from Paris arrived at Atocha station, the line having been built in less time than it took to complete the Madrid–Barcelona high-speed link.

The advent of the railway entailed a radical change for Madrid, from its comfortable isolation in the middle of the Castilian plateau, ‘a predator of its own environment, inexplicably the court of an imperial monarchy’,21 to a capital accessible from every city of the Spanish periphery. The concept of the Puerta del Sol as the centre of the world began to vanish, as the north–west axis along the Paseo de la Castellana was extended and gradually took on the role of Madrid’s gateway to the industrial ports of Bilbao and Santander to the north, and the great Andalucían cities of Sevilla, Granada and Málaga to the south.

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