Snippets from Spain

Madrid Buried a Highway to Bring Back Birds

My husband Fabio says Madrid is the perfect place to live except that it doesn’t have a beach. He yearns for breezes, cool water, relaxation, and rolling waves. These days temperatures in Madrid stretch to the upper nineties. They keep us indoors between late morning and evening. We slather on sunscreen. We ricochet from one side of the street to the other searching for shade. Despite no beach, the name of our city comes from an Arabic word for water that an emir gave to it in the mid-800s. Until twenty years ago, the city verged on losing what little remained until a cockamamie, costly, and controversial plan brought it back.

“Madrid” comes from the Arabic word “Mayrit,” the name the emir gave to a fortress his men constructed above the banks of what’s now the Manzanares River. “Mayrit” is the hybrid of two Mozarabic words: “matrice” meaning fountain and “majrà,” riverbed. Both refer to the abundance of water, rivers, and groundwater the Moors found.

One shouldn’t get any illusions about Madrid’s Manzanares River, the main body of water running through the city. Even in the 1600s, poet Francisco de Quevedo (whom I mention here) wrote “Manzanares, Manzanares, river’s apprentice.” Compared to the American, Stanislaus, and Rogue rivers that I’ve rafted, the Manzanares is not much more than a trickle. Outside the city, the river is more impressive. It runs fifty-seven miles from its source in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains. Eighteen miles of it pass through the community of Madrid.

Its flow has played an important role in the city and not just in the summer when madrileños swam and waded in it and sunbathed on its banks. The water turned the wheels of flour, iron, and paper mills. Channels irrigated fields. Women gathered on its banks to wash clothes. Old timers say that they found in eddies buttons that had fallen off shirts and pants that they recouped for their own. Men fished from the banks.

Working and socializing on the banks of the Manzanares River

During Fabio and my early visits to Madrid in 2015, we invented routes to get to know the city. One sweltering day, we wound our way to the path along the Manzanares. The green water didn’t move. Plastic bags and tin cans lined the swampy shore. Few birds rested in the rushes. No spray cooled us. We walked about a mile until we changed course to find a beer that would refresh us more than a breeze from the water.

We didn’t know the Manzanares was creeping back to its natural state. Dams built across the river in the 1950s made it impossible for native fauna to build their habitats. Along the river, cars and trucks from the M-30, a six-lane highway, transported over 250,000 cars daily. They emitted fumes, diesel, and other contaminants and covered homes with soot. Car horns blared constantly.

Beginning in 2003, Madrid’s mayor oversaw a contentious and mammoth engineering project to build eighteen miles of tunnels, some passing under the river, to bury the traffic and eliminate part of the M-30. Political controversy roared because of cost and corruption. Madrileños were convinced the project would bankrupt the city. Simultaneously, the mayor constructed an urban park Madrid Río over a hundred hectares once consumed by road to bring people back to the river’s edge. This area provided tennis and basketball courts, soccer fields, a skate park, plazas, cafes, restaurants, an orchard, cycling paths, and eleven new footbridges. Madrid Rio won in 2015 an award from Harvard University’s School of Design.

Madrid Rio: credits Madrid Happy People and El Diario de Madrid

A year after Fabio and I took our first stroll by the shore, the city council began to restore the natural habitat. Engineers removed dams so water flowed freely. In 2017, they had brought back the riverbanks by removing loose rocks that impeded flow. They planted more than 16,000 native trees.

Now, Fabio and I don’t look for a beer along the river. We see grey herons, mallards, and egrets nesting there. Kingfishers and cormorants take a break on their way to Africa. Native plants line the banks and dot the islands. In the river’s upper reaches, otters, wild boar, and foxes, which disappeared in the 1950s, amble along the shore.

Resuscitated river: credits Madrid's Hidden Gems and Freepik

The Manzanares now also helps Madrid shield itself from climate change. The restructured riverbank has containers that can hold excess water in case of a five-hundred-year flood event. Native pines and other trees along the river cool the city and provide shade to passersby.

The city doesn’t offer a beach. But it’s still close to a perfect place to live. Burying the M-30 didn’t bankrupt the city. Walking along a rewilded river and possibly glimpsing an otter or a fox means more to the city’s and planet’s future than jamming an umbrella in the sand. The Manzanares is a little river that’s always done big things.

River offers something for everyone: credit Madrid Happy People photo 1