Atocha Station: A Jungle Under Iron
Why is it significant?
Look up at that enormous curved roof of iron and glass, and instead of the hiss of trains, picture palm trees, damp warm air and the smell of a greenhouse.
Key Facts
| Place | Atocha Station: A Jungle Under Iron |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaza del Emperador Carlos V, 28045 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.40700, -3.69140 |
| Part of Walk | Madrid's Landscape of Light: The Paseo del Arte, the Prado & the Retiro |
| Generated | Generated |
Look up at that enormous curved roof of iron and glass, and instead of the hiss of trains, picture palm trees, damp warm air and the smell of a greenhouse. This is the old Atocha station, the first doorway into Madrid for generations of travellers from the south, and it is the perfect place to start a walk about art... because the building itself is a work of art that nearly became scrap.
People will tell you Gustave Eiffel designed it. He did not. The shed was finished in 1892 by Alberto de Palacio, a Basque architect working with French engineers, and its single span is nearly fifty metres wide. The same Alberto de Palacio gave the world one of its strangest machines, the transporter bridge over the estuary near Bilbao, where a hanging gondola still ferries cars across the water. He thought in iron, the way painters think in colour.
By the 1980s the old shed was too small and too tired for modern railways. So when the architect Rafael Moneo built a new station next door for the high-speed line to Seville, opened in 1992, he kept this cathedral of iron and filled it with a tropical garden. Thousands of plants, palms climbing towards the glass, a pond, mist drifting between leaves. Madrileños began to come here not to catch a train but simply to sit and breathe.
Atocha also carries a heavier memory. On the 11th of March 2004, bombs exploded on commuter trains arriving here and at other stations on the same line, and 192 people were killed. It remains the deadliest attack in Spain's modern history, and the city still marks the date every year, quietly.
Today the station is being reshaped again for a new generation of trains, and the garden under the old roof is changing with it. Now step out onto the great roundabout, the Glorieta del Emperador Carlos V, and look across the traffic for a long granite building with two glass towers stuck to its face like elevators on a spaceship. Inside waits the most famous painting of the twentieth century.