La Latina

》Estación Madrid - Puerta de Atocha

If there is one place in the capital of Spain that best symbolises the city’s eternal welcoming spirit, it is Atocha station. The iron heart of Madrid was the first train station to be built in the city in 1851. All of Spain’s railway lines were developed around the infrastructure, the destination of all the routes along which over 100 million passengers per year on average now travel. Its huge central nave, an excellent example of late-nineteenth-century iron architecture, has become an icon of the capital.

^The origins of Atocha

On 9 February 1851, Queen Isabella II and her entourage departed for the first time by train to Aranjuez, thus opening the second railway line to be built in Spain. They left from the Embarcadero de Atocha, a simple building with wooden platforms that was the precursor to the current station. Initially built as a private luxury for the royals, the station—then known as the Central Station of Madrid—had to gradually expand and adapt to burgeoning passenger travel, until it was partially consumed by a fire in 1864. The event was a turning point that led to growing use of iron—a safer material than wood—for projects in order to respond to the great demand for rail travel, making a station in line with a great capital such as Madrid a reality. In 1883, the winning project to design the station’s main nave was that of the architect Alberto de Palacio y Elissague, a collaborator of Gustave Eiffel. Its characteristic canopy, however, is the work of the French engineer Henri Saint-James, who built this rail architecture artwork inspired by the iron architecture he had seen at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. What had previously been known as the Estación del Mediodía—which, during the twentieth century with the development of rail on the Iberian Peninsula, would become the most important transport hub and the starting point of Spain’s modern-day rail network—was eventually inaugurated in 1892.

^The tropical garden of Atocha

One of Rafael Moneo’s great ideas was to make the most of the main central nave—spanning a length of 152 metres and a height of 27 metres—covered with iron and glass like an enormous greenhouse and thus a perfect place for tropical plants. The result is a lush garden extending over 4,000 square metres on the site of the old tracks and platforms, which houses over 7,200 plants of 260 species from five continents. Palm trees, banana trees, coconut trees and breadfruit trees grow under the natural light that shines through the translucent glass canopy with near jungle-like conditions.Read more