Parque del Buen Retiro

El Retiro, Madrid's main park, is a terrific oasis in the middle of this giant city. It is also a weird and varied slice of urban life in Spain.

The most striking feature of El Retiro is the very formal lay-out and careful planning of the entire park and all of its landscaping. It is a beautiful, though certainly not the best (La Granja maybe?) example of this quintessentially Spanish design. The formal garden has two historical antecedents in Spain. The first, obviously enough, is from Islam; every major mosque was attached to a formal garden, complete with water-features, that were supposed to communicate a vision of paradise to the worshippers. The second comes by way of the Bourbon dynasty, which took over the Spanish monarchy at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Predicatbly enough, Philip V was somewhat inspired by his grandfather's garden at Versailles, and tried to recreate it in several locations (Palacio Real, Aranjuez, La Granja).

El Retiro started life as a part of the royal palace in Madrid. After Philip II officially withdrew his court to the nearby El Escorial in the later sixteenth century, there was still a need for a palace in Madrid apart from the old Muslim castle (Alcázar) that sat where the current Palacio Real stands.
The result was a complex, including a very large formal garden, on the eastern side of the old city of Madrid. Philip IV was largely responsible for the layout of the formal gardens in the 1640s.
After 1700, the Bourbon dynasty created the current royal Palace across town near the Manzanares River. The palace complex of El Retiro fell into disuse, and was heavily damaged during the war with Napoleon. Today, only the Prado museum and the Casón de Buen Retiro (also part of the Prado) remain.

The real treasure, however, was always the formal gardens. They were restored after years of disuse by Carlos III in the 1760s. He opened the royal preserve to the city's public in 1767. Carlos III was responsible for a whole series of restorations and public building projects in Madrid. This Enlightenment monarch should probably be remembered as one of modern Spain's three greatest kings (the others being Alfonso XII, who modernized Spanish government, and Juan Carlos I, the current king, who saved Spain from itself).

So the park became public, and gradually shrank to the existing size, surrounded completely by the city. In many ways, El Retiro is the perfect aristocratic island of beauty in the middle of the urban hussle. The grand avenues, fountains, statues, monuments, and trees introduced by generations of royal patrons remain the Park's outstanding feature. It is also the civic heart of Madrid: home to all manner of special events, and visited by nearly everyone.

The downside of El Retiro is that it is the most accessible park for a giagantic population of city dwellers of all shapes and sizes. It is always crowded. I have also witnessed an unfortunate array of weird events there. Today, I watched a nice old grandfather aid and abet his six (or so) year old grandson while he shit beside a tree. While Gretta and Gail were here, we watched the cops pull a big dead labarador retriever out of one of the fountains (I can't imagine how it got there). El Retiro also bears the brunt of the Spanish litter problem, to which I referred in an earlier post.

Despite these strange and unfortunate events, El Retiro is probably my favorite part of Madrid. It is every bit as nice as Central Park, but with far more character.