Royal Palace of Madrid

The site's first building was raised by Muhammad I, Umayyad emir of Córdoba, between 860 and 880. Henry III of Castile added towers and made it one of his most-used residences; in 1476, during the War of the Castilian Succession, the troops of Joanna la Beltraneja were besieged in the alcázar and the building was damaged.

Charles V extended and renovated it in 1537 with the architects Alonso de Covarrubias and Luis de Vega. Philip II, who made Madrid his capital in 1561, pressed the work further, adding the Golden Tower and the Royal Armoury; Philip III and Philip IV added a long southern façade between 1610 and 1636.

On Christmas Eve 1734 fire broke out in the rooms of the French painter Jean Ranc. Response was delayed because the warning bells were mistaken for the call to mass, and the doors were kept shut for fear of looting, which hampered the rescue. Velázquez's Expulsion of the Moors was lost; Las Meninas was saved by being thrown from a window. The blaze burned for four days; by some accounts it destroyed the alcázar outright, by others the fire was partial and the ruin was then pulled down almost entirely. The last walls came down in 1738.

Philip V commissioned a replacement and building began in 1738; to guard against another fire it was raised entirely in masonry with vaulted ceilings, timber confined to joinery and roof structure. Filippo Juvarra devised a vast scheme inspired by Bernini's designs for the Louvre, but died before it could be built, and his pupil Juan Bautista Sachetti was required to fit the plans to the old alcázar's plot. Ventura Rodríguez shaped the Royal Chapel, and Francesco Sabatini finished the building. Completed in the reign of Ferdinand VI, the palace was first occupied in 1764 by Charles III, the first monarch to live there continuously.

Father Martín Sarmiento's sculptural programme conceived the palace as an effigy of an armed Spain and a new Temple of Solomon: ninety-four kings of Spain were to crown the upper balustrade, four Roman emperors flank the main doorway, and America be represented by Moctezuma II and Atahualpa. Felipe de Castro and Juan Domingo Olivieri directed the carving from 1749, using limestone from Colmenar rather than marble to cut costs.

In 1760 Charles III had the sculptures taken down from the cornice to give the building a more classical air, and from 1787 they were distributed among Spanish gardens and parks; the row known as the Gothic kings now stands in the Plaza de Oriente and the rest in the Sabatini Gardens. A restoration of the façades in 1973 reinstated some of the sculptures.

Work on the Plaza de Oriente began in 1808, when Joseph Bonaparte ordered the demolition of some sixty medieval buildings on the site, among them a church, a monastery and the royal library. He was deposed before it was finished; Isabella II completed it to Narciso Pascual Colomer's 1844 design.

Ferdinand VII, who had spent years imprisoned at the Château de Valençay, began the most thorough remodelling of the interior in the 19th century, to turn an old-fashioned Italian building into a modern French-style palace. His grandson Alfonso XII had José Segundo de Lema recast rooms as a Victorian residence; the queen's three apartments became the banqueting hall between 1879 and 1885, their ceiling frescoes kept.

The palace was listed as a bien de interés cultural on 3 June 1931. Alfonso XIII was the last monarch to live in it; under the Second Republic it was known as the Palacio Nacional, and the Republic's president Manuel Azaña occupied the rooms that had been Queen María Cristina's, the last head of state to live there. The Sabatini Gardens were laid out from 1933 by the Republican government to return the ground from royal control to the people, though the public were not admitted until King Juan Carlos I opened them in 1978. Parts of the Royal Armoury's collection were lost in the Peninsular War and again in the Civil War, whose damage to the palace was repaired in the second half of the twentieth century.

The palace belongs to the Spanish state and is run by Patrimonio Nacional; it remains the king's official residence and is used for state ceremonies, though the royal family live at the Palace of Zarzuela. The Crown Room holds Juan Carlos I's abdication speech and Felipe VI's proclamation speech. It is open to visitors except during state functions, only a fraction of its 3,418 rooms being shown at any one time; it received more than 1.4 million visitors in 2023.